Mars in Miniature

[RArcher]

Was just messing about this evening and came up with this one.  Gives me a great feeling of scale, like you are a few inches above the ground in a Martian environment.  I was going to render it at higher quality as it was supposed to be my preview (0.5 detail, 5AA, 1/1 GI), but I'm not sure it would keep the nice fuzziness at high quality.

[dhavalmistry]

too much of blur.....although the foreground looks good...

[Volker Harun]

I like the blur

[rcallicotte]

I like your terrain and colors.  The background blur is cool, in my opinion, but I'm not sure about the other.

[sflynn]

Your lighting and colors are fantastic as always.

Maybe a more gradual blur? I like it as is anyway. Nice work, again!

[efflux]

Nice picture. The colours and surfaces are really good. I think for that blur to be convincing you'd have to be much closer to the ground. With the scale of things it doesn't look like you are close enough.

[rcallicotte]

I agree with efflux.  I like the blur for the mountains in the very far distant background.  Otherwise, the other is sort of unrealistic.

[RArcher]

Thanks for all the comments.  The idea wasn't to get any sort of realism, but to instead go for a sort of Tilt-Shift photographic affect in the foreground whereby it makes the rocks and landscape seem like miniature models.  I am trying this sort of affect with my next render as well, I think it will work out a little better.

Tilt-shift Photographic Examples (not mine)
http://hame.ca/blog3/tiltshift/gallery/littleboats.php

more:
http://hame.ca/blog3/tiltshift/

[rcallicotte]

I haven't seen this used as a medium for artistic photography.  What is generating the interest?

[efflux]

My feeling is that in a photo this might give strange and unusual effects especially since the viewer will often immediately recognize it as a photo but the trouble in TG2 is that people will think it simply looks like a DOF creation mistake.

[RArcher]

Calico:  It absolutely is a form of artistic photography.  It is not huge but it is big enough that there are at least a dozen or so specialized tilt-shift lens available.  I find most of the photo's in this style fascinating, but maybe that is just me.

Efflux:  I fear you may be right, but it is unfortunate that the conventions and open mindedness  with photography cannot always be applied to 3D Landscape / Modeling images as well.  Most of the time with my renders I am trying to create scenes of places that do not exist and then share them not unlike sharing a photograph with a viewer.  Things are definitely changing but I wish that digital creations would lose the stigma of not being artistic expression a little quicker.

[efflux]

Yes, you can do whatever you want and I'm not saying that this technique is not fine to use but the viewer has preconvieved ideas about what a photo looks like. Actually very accurate ideas even if they don't realize it because we're so used to looking at photos. It's just something to bear in mind.

[bigben]

It's an essential technique of large format photography, especially for closeups. A standard lens for a 4x5" camera is around 150-180mm so the DOF is quite small and lens movements are required to shift the plane of focus to cover the subject as much as possible.

Now there's a challenge for you HB, a wedge shaped DOF mask  

...and nice image RArcher  

[sjefen]

Good work. It looks nice, but I also think it has too much blur. I think blur is best suited for clouse up scenes.