Virtual World

The grandaddy of all projects - combining images to make a virtual world scene. This assignment had so much freedom, I almost didn't know where to begin. Got some inspiration from my mum when she volunteered at Nan Tien temple, so I drew a quick, very ugly mockup.

Went to a nearby temple to grab a couple of shots, then travelled to the city to grab some scenery shots from the Chinese Gardens. Also, waterfalls aren't exactly common in Sydney, so I had to be creative and snap all the water features near Darling Harbour.

Before I started fixing them up in photoshop, I used the Camera Raw plugin to get the colours I wanted. With the temple, I wanted to emphasise it's vibrant colours. With the water, I wanted a blue tinge, and I darkened the background so I could easily remove it and change its blending mode to something like Screen.

Then came the deep-etching. Oh, God, the deep-etching. So much zooming in. So much eye strain. I had to deep-etch rocks which would become the mountains. I had to deep-etch the temples and pagodas. I had to deep-etch the model.

Next, I had to enlarge the rock so it would look like a mountain, as well as duplicate it to make the background. And I had to duplicate it in such a way as to be different each time. And the rock was oddly shaped too, which added to my woes. Clone Stamp was a huge help.

The sky was in (and I made it extremely blue on purpose), the moutains were in. Now I had to put in the temples, pagodas, and waterfalls. Putting in the temple was hard. I had to burn in some shadows to make it look like it was built on the mountain and not just stuck in by some media student. I also erased some bits with a soft-edged eraser, and changed the lighting dramatically on the pagodas to make them look semi-natural. I made the lighting in the foreground brighter than the background.

I looked at some references to see how mist and fog settles around mountains, then I brushed them into the background and foreground with a medium brush set onto white and 35% opacity, changing the brush shapes to vary the look of the fog.

Next, I used the field from the temple picture, but manipulated the photo with Puppet Warp to turn it into a hill. Then I placed the deep-etched model onto the hill, burnt in some shadows and changed her lighting so that she look like she was in the foreground and closer to the audience than the rest of the image.