Help with general scenery stuff, plants, trees, ppl, etc

[guitarboy]

Gday all, im fairly new to the 3d world and was just wanting to ask a few quick questions, sorry in advance if im in the wrong section for this, i wasnt sure where to post it.

 

im just doing some still images and was wondering how you guys get plants, trees, people, animals, and all those general things into you images, do you do them in photshop as 2d pics? or all 3d models? or a bit of both depending on the situation?

 

and also, if it is the photoshop option, how do i get it to cast a shadow? do i need to set something up in my render before i take it into photoshop, or is there something in photoshop that i can use to do this?

 

i am using 3d studio max 8, vray 1.5 and photoshop cs2.

 

Many thanks

[STRAT]

for trees and plants i'll generally use 3d stuff. cinema 4d had some nice 3d plugins for this (vb tree), as does 3dstudio max (speed tree, xfrog, onyx etc etc).

 

people i tend to comp in with photo shop as i have control over constast/shading and AO shadowing. Getting a main shadow is just a case of creating a duplicate layer of the person in photoshop and manipulating it to look like a shadow. (ie, blacken it out, then scale/size/skew it to look like a shadow being cast, then blur it and transparency it to suit).

 

you need good photoshop skills as everything you add in photoshop needs to match the rendered scene perfectly. ie, colour, brightness, contrasts, scale and size etc etc. get these wrong and they stand out a royal mile.

[guitarboy]

awesome, thanks heaps. so where does everyone get there 2d stuff from, and 3d i guess as well. for 2d do u go out with ur own camera and get what you like, or have ppl found some nice packages out there already in both fields?

[STRAT]

when i need 2d content (ie, people maps) i generally ask my boss for his company credit card and he usually obliges

 

it's not often i go out with my own camera as there are stacks of things available on the web. as i say, we'll pay for a better quality product, both 2d and 3d (ie, axyz people, got3d people, lowpolygon3d cars etc etc), but here are a few freebee 2d texture sites you might find of use -

 

http://free-textures.got3d.com/index.html

http://www.mayang.com/textures/

http://www.cgtextures.com/

http://www.accustudio.com/exchange/textures.php?dir=

[guitarboy]

Wow, thanks heaps again, ill have go with these and start posting up my work once i get my head around using them.

 

thanks so much for your help.