November Image

I feel that my November image has come out quite well. After reading a few tutorials online I found that it was quite easy to create the fire effect and that really finishes the image off! Here is how I created the Bonfire scene.

Creating the scene
Firstly, I drew out a cylinder with only a very thin height to build the rest of my image up on. I then drew some spheres in different sizes to use as hills in the background. I positioned these at the back of the cylinder with only the top section showing through. Having some closer to the front than the others gave the impression of depth to the image.

I then added a box at the back of the cylinder that was wide and tall enough to fill the viewport but only with a very small depth. Later on I would use this as the background.

Creating the Bonfire
First, I had to create some logs for the fire. I started off with a cylinder and converted it to Editable Poly, where I pulled the vertices around a bit until the cylinder looked a bit wonky! This gave me my rough log shape that I could use to build up my bonfire.

I then cloned this log several times and rotated and arranged them into a circle to create the built up fire. Once I had done this, I grouped all the logs together and cloned the group so I had two sets of logs. I lowered one set and rotated it slightly, placing it underneath the other to give the bonfire some depth and to make it look like there are a lot more logs there.

I then created another cylinder that was just wide enough for the bonfire to sit on. I would use this later as the dirt underneath the bonfire. To create the stones to surround the bonfire, I drew out a small sphere and placed it with about half showing through the cylinder base. I then cloned this many times and positioned the clones all the way around the perimeter of the bonfire until I had a complete circle.

Now I had the basis of the bonfire, I needed to create the most important bit, the fire!

To do this, I went to the create menu, helpers, atmospherics and Sphere Gizmo. I gave the gizmo a radius of 43.6 and then added a Fire effect under Atmosphere and Effect. I set the flame type to Fireball and then played around with the characteristics of the flame until I was happy with the result. I then positioned the Sphere Gizmo in the centre of the log pile and with the top half sticking up over the top. This gave a good effect of the flames coming from the logs themselves.

Adding Materials
To complete the image, I needed to add some materials to make the shapes look even more realistic. First I added materials to the scene.

For the main ground, I added a grass bitmap to a Blinn Material and set the map properties to Texture and Planar from Object. I then applied this to the base cylinder which worked well in the scene. For the hills in the background, I used the same technique but with a few different properties on the material as the same material didn’t look quite right. I changed the map properties to Environment and Screen mapping. When I applied this new material to the hills, they looked much better against the base cylinder rather than with the same material.

For the logs of the bonfire, I created another material with a bitmap image of some tree bark which I tiled 1.5 times in both directions. I changed the specular level to 26 to add some highlights and softened the image slightly by 0.4. I then applied this material to all of the logs that made up the bonfire. I felt this material looked really good on the logs and worked well.

To create a dirt base to the bonfire, I created yet another material with an image of some soil as the map and changed the map settings to Environment and Screen Mapping. Applying this to the cylinder gave a good soil base to the bonfire which made it even more realistic.

Finally, I added a background image material to the box at the back of image which I found on the internet. If I had more time I would have created the image myself.

Finishing Touches
As the perspective viewport wasn’t quite right as a good view of the image, I created a Target camera and placed this at the front of the image looking down onto the scene. I positioned it such that the bonfire was the centre focal point with the hills providing a good horizon line.

I added two omni lights to the scene, one at the front and one backlighting. This just gave the right amount of light on the scene to make it as realistic as possible. As the background image was a night scene, the image had to look like night time but also with enough light so that everything could be seen! I played around with a few intensity settings for the lights but I found that they looked good without much tweeking.

Finally, I added a target spot light directly about the bonfire. I changed the spot radius to the same size as the bonfire and adjusted the falloff so that there was some spill around the edge of the light. I changed the colour of this light to a light yellow orange colour to give the impression the light was coming from the bonfire itself.

Final Thoughts
I really like this image and I am happy with how it has come out. I tried creating some smoke coming from the top of the fire by following a couple of online tutorials but in the end I decided I didn’t like the look with the smoke coming off of the top.

I feel if I had spent a bit more time on this I could have added some extra elements to this image such as fireworks or people standing by.

Overall, I am happy with the outcome of this image.