However, the final render results didn’t strongly impress me. They weren’t too bad, but they weren’t too good either. So it was necessary for me to play with the render. I wanted to have the effect of a strong camera zoom so that the locomotive was separated from the background and for this purpose I decided to use the ZDepth channel for DOF, which is also very useful for fog (Fig.62 – Fig.64).

Also it was needed to create the steam and smoke that I wanted to come out of the locomotive’s chimney. From studying the pictures of the locomotives, I saw that the smoke was different in different case – white, gray or black. I didn’t want to deepen it. The problem was that I didn’t know how to show moving smoke on a static image. After many variants and test, I understood that I didn’t want too long a loop of smoke, because it would block out the sky and some of the background details. For smoke I used the FumeFX plugin. It is simple enough to use and is very powerful. Here are a few examples of my tests (Mov.14 – Mov.16).

For post-production I used Digital Fusion and Photoshop. For me Digital Fusion is very easy to use, with different layers and passes such as ZDepth, RGB, Light, Shadows, Reflections passes etc (Fig.65).