I did a few types of stone to cover the ground near the locomotive, but when I realized that I would have to cover the whole ground with these stones, I started to imagine my computer becoming slower and slower, and eventually belching out smoke and dying. Of course I did a few tests, but it just wasn't working. In such situations it's best to use the V-Ray Displacement modifier, which helped in my case (Fig.55 – Fig.57 & Mov.12).






I used a lot of textures from own collection, and also from www.cgtextures.com.  Here you can find a large library of high res textures that cover all sorts of subjects. As I mentioned earlier, for practically every texture I used the normal map with the help of the Nvidia Normal Map plugin for Photoshop. I understand that this is a Making of, not a Tutorial, but I still thought it would be useful to show you the method I used to quickly create a normal bump map for this scene (Mov.13).

Lighting

For lighting I used V-Ray. Usually I set up the lights and position of camera in the early stages of a piece of work, but in this case it was necessary to do a few lighting tests, because I wanted to do a few variations and then choose the best one. I did not use Global Illumination; I used V-Ray Dome with a gradient map for the environment and a Target Directional Light to imitate the sunlight. I find that it is always simpler to work with neutral colors, because then I'm always able to do color correction in Photoshop (Fig.58 – Fig.60).

Rendering & Post Production

My render settings were not particularly complicated – I'd even say they were simple (Fig.61).