Illumination

I wanted to make my scene to be lit by sunlight almost at sunset, and I wanted to take advantage of the nice soft shadows and contrast that it would make.

I put a almost white/orange light in the right side of the image, and added some blue omni lights to simulate light from the sky.

I tried illuminating this scene without GI, as you can see, it pretty much came out nicely!

Composition

As for compositing, after rendering my image I opened it in Photoshop and made a few changes, like some brightness correction, noise adding and some color correction. One special task I made for this picture was adding some vegetal elements and birds. The big bird was taken out of a picture I found in the web, which I masked it and overlayed it in my sky. The other birds were drawn and layered in several places. Some plants were added directly in 3dsmax but others were added in Photshop, again with masking of photographs. I then did some color correction and darkenning in the areas around the plants to simulate soft shadows.

To finish the compositing, I added a duplicate layer of my picture and set it to screen mode, and then I made a threshold of it to get a contrasted black/white version of my picture in order to get a soft glow around parts of the picture that are brighter. After that, I just had to blur it a bit.

Thats it! I made my very first tutorial / Project overview ever! I hope you all liked it

See you all soon ;)

Migue Madaíl de Freitas