初霜

First Frost

UPDATE 2012-11-17

The more I looked at my original render, the more I felt that it lacked interest, the lighting could be improved, the grass seemed too sharpened, the background trees were too dull and flat, and the composition could be improved.

Version 4 of First Frost addresses all of those issues. I’m now satisfied with the render.

UPDATE: 2012-11-14

At the bottom of my original post, I asked if someone knew how to fix an annoying faint line that displays in the render caused by the transparent edge of the backround image. Please see Mr. Lampost’s comment below for the simple solution.

My computer is five years old but it has a multi-core CPU and a lot of memory, so this scene renders in about 2 minutes on my machine. Expect longer render times on slower computers.

I was trying to create a cold feeling while keeping the morning sun a warm color.

As always, everything in my models are free of copyright and I don’t require credit. Do what you want with the scene, the images, and models.

The Sky, the background trees, and the fox are images–all of which are free of any copyrights.

The bird is a simple model meant only to be used in the distance.

The ground has a texture image with bump and normal maps. The grass is procedural. The brown and red fallen leaves are images displayed with a particle system.

The frost is a combination of a cloud texture with noise. The noise has an emit setting to simulate glisening on the frost. There is a bit of frost on the tree trunk as well.

There is a slight vignette framing the scene.

There is an annoying faint line about a third of the way from the top. That is the top of the transparency of the background image that displays for some reason. This has occurred in similar scenes I’ve created. I have premultiply checked and I’ve tried a number of things to make the alpha part of the image completely transparent, but to no avail. If anyone knows what causes it and how to fix it, I would appreciate it if you would leave a comment.