Abstract Mountains

This piece was largely an experiment into materials and rendering settings, started off I wanted to make a lot of faceted multi-colored mountains and then developed as I went on, the renders below show the process and I will explain some stuff about the rendering and materials as I go. The first few steps aren't included but its all processes I have gone over before.

 Initially I wanted the mountains sitting on water, I made a floor 5 different mountains and a physical sky.

 I then duplicated the first set of mountains and changed their proportions and layout abit.

 I decided that I wanted to make the piece more abstract by putting mountains facing downward above, to do this I grouped the first set and rotated and moved them into place.

 I then changed the physical sky to create my own lights and sky, first I made a gradient but it didnt work very well until I changed the mapping below.

 Even here the gradient isn't that easy to see I think this is due to the size of the skybox, If I wanted a gradient behind it, it would be better to use a plane rather than the sky, though I decided against a gradient in the end.

 Here I moved some of the mountains to try and improve the composition.

 This is what happened when I used global illumination lights and sky sampling all at the sametime, I tried not to do it again because its horrible.

 Here is the same image as above but without global illumination, the background is still horrible.

 something went wrong with the sampling (I distinctly remember having sky sampling, and area sampling turned off) but it came out with this mad green version, it wasn't intentional but I thought I'd put it in cos it informed the final piece showing how lighting can bring together a scene.

 I wanted to check if changing the sky would get rid of the weird mountain colouring, it did not.

 back to normal, and a darker sky gradient with sampling on.

 played about with the galaxy texture, it gave interesting results for the global illumination but I didn't really like it for this piece.

Added stars in the background but its really hard to see and there are so few of them that its not really effective but I did like the black as the background colour, although it is the most basic choice it doesn't detract from the mountains like so many other backgrounds did.

 I then put a relatively dim light red area light over the whole pieve to try and bring the colours together alittle bit. the below renders are all me playing with the ambient occlusion to get an effective result that shades most of the facets but doesn't go overboard the final image was the one I settled on.

 Ambient occlusion contrast: 20%

 Ambient occlusion contrast: 30%

Ambient occlusion contrast: 40%

From creating this piece I learnt that I need to work on my backgrounds and that its probably best to not do anything with global illumination until the final scene. I also realised how important unified lighting is to tieing a scene together and that ambient occlusion will always make something look good you just have to find the right setting which will likely be different for every scene.