Assignment - September - Phase 4 : Wheat

Time to start adding the little extras and cool stuff to help polish the image. I mean, I could just have the crow perching on the bucket... but having a straw of wheat in its beak is more cliche and stylish. It was also time to start thinking about backgrounds. For a field of wheat, I could create it in 3DS Max... but considering the amount of wheat I'd have to make... it's not so much a problem of time (As you could just clone the first grain about a hundred times), it was more space. Anyone got several gig spare for some wheat?

So I went searching for some nice images. This one looked perfect. Let's try it out!

Not bad... though a little tall. The 3D image is somewhat engulfed by the wheat. A few tweaks needed methinks. The basic straw was also added into the crow's mouth. Simply a very thin cone with a bit of help from the 'Bend' modifier.

This is the Wheat image Mk II. It was chopped a bit, to help grant a little bit more height. I also had a bit of fun with the colour modifier, to try and add a bit more of a yellow/orange glow to it; to really add an 'Autumn' feel to it. The sky was less co-operative to colour changes. But it worked as a nice contrast anyway.


Anyway, back to the wheat. The grains were an easy addition. Take a sphere, scale down 2 of the dimensions/axes, leaving a single one at normal level: Thus creating an elongated pill shape. Then simply clone several times and attach to the straw. That's all there is to it.

A test-render showed that the grains overlapped eachother, and the back row couldn't be seen. No matter. A little bit of rotating later and the grains are now in full view. The new background also works nicely with the image.

The final bit of the wheat was to add the 'threads' which protrude from it. These threads were simply smaller versions of the straw. A very long, but incredibly thin cone... tweaked with the bend tool. As before, clone until you get bored and move to fit.

And there it is! The wheat in the crow's beak. A simple addition, but a nifty one at that. Can't be a bad thing, can it? Let's see how it looks...

Nice! That's worked well. As you can probably tell, lighting was also added the image. As before, the lighting was basically a few weak 'Omni' lights to help illuminate the image, a strong orange/yellow spot-light to create the effect of the sunlight, and then another omni on 'glow' mode; to create a sunset glow on the right-hand side. As well as shadows and a sunset effect on the textures, the lights have also created a nice little sparkle on the water. Lovely