Help adding visual depth to rendering

[toms200]

I'm having trouble adding depth to my renderings. The image below is a good example. The vegetation opposite the lawn flattens out even thought the large trees are 30' beyond the oddly green ornametal tree. I cant seem to get fog to work and I'm not sure if that's what I should be using anyway. I'm not getting much success with depth of fied either. Far DOF is set at the near edge of the lawn in this image. Any suggestions? I'm rendering with MR & MR sky.

 

 

[Corey Beaulieu]

A couple of things that I notice with this image...

 

I think that your colors are all WAY too saturated and the foreground planting looks unrealistic. This can easily be fixed in post or by adjusting your maps. I, frankly, recommend adjusting your maps to a new tone of green and just save them as an iteration of the map into a project folder. I say this because, generally speaking, the greens of your image should all match. Not exactly, but they should be in the right genre. To do this i usually find an image of greenery online and use Photoshops "Match Color" to move all green maps into the same arena, but keep the luminance and texture of the original.

 

Secondly, I think your brick wall on the right should get a displacement map, or a higher value if you are using one. I think its close enough to warrant.

 

Lastly, ditch your fog and your DOF and just render a ZDepth element. you can use this in post to create an appropriate look and feel for your background, just make sure that you don't have a lot of black. Set the depth to roughly the distance of the last visible object in your scene or just beyond.

[salvador]

Indeed; the background generally sepaking for this kind of place should look darker than the foreground and that's a great contribution to the depth you are looking for.

[hockley91]

In my opinion, I believe a different sun angle would benefit greatly in showing a separation of foreground and background elements. There also looks like a resolution issue with the main image and foreground image. You can see the photoshop work in the image. I would sharpen the image up more and get a higher resolution image to work with. Also, some depth of field to the back of the image would create more "focus" and some vignetting.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

Especially agree re: sun angle. Right behind the camera is known as a flattener.