Danbury Field

I decided to create a simple field in 3ds max, as I thought not many people would ass this in. I thought is would fit in well with the beauty of Essex theme, as we wanted our clips to be fairly short and sweet I thought it would work well.




I used a stock foliage part that comes with 3ds max, this I then turned into an editable poly so I could manipulate it and change it. I took away all of the access think leaves at the bottom and left the stalks and blossoming tops. I pulled and stretched this also so that it was a little different to the standard object



I selected parts of the plant to make different polygons have different ID's, I did this so I can texture the plant with more than one colour or map. I selected the flowers as one ID, the stalk as another. I used a GRASS Bitmap for the green on the stalk, i used this as it has many variants and variation in colour apposed to using just a straight green from the colour picker.

For the flower I used a Gradient Ramp colour, ranging from white to yellow and also a darker shade of yellow. This will keep the pattern different on each petal, creating a very nice finish.



To create the field I copy and pasted the plant, rotating it and keeping it having some variance. I used a simple dirt texture for the ground, and an image of Danbury skyline for the background.



I placed a panning camera in the shot, I spread the key frames from moving the camera wide apart. So that the movement was very slow and steady, panning close to the field.




I used 3 Omni lights in this scene, one main source of light, and 2 others close in front of the camera to light up the rape crop.

This bellow shows a final render of the field, I'm very happy with this simple modelling, the textures on the plant, and its flowers has good variance and looks almost photographic.