Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=84672&Start=1&Artist=agiel&ByArtist=Yes

I have been working on this since thursday night and I finally posted it after getting sick of it. For some reason, I am not happy with how the garden turned out. Any idea on how to make it look less artificial ? (The link goes to the larger version of the picture in my gallery). Thanks

The only thing that I can see is that the garden needs more contrast. Otherwise, it's wondeful.

You might try lowering your haze amount, and possibly some green colored spotlights with shadows turned off shining on your vegetation. I think it looks pretty good though. Rich

Mabe some tweaking with the sun control will help. If ambient light balance is set to more from sky, more shadows will be visible under the vegetations. If light balance is set to more sunlight, the transitions between light and shadows will be more obvious. Also tweaking with the ambient light color "lum" could do a miracle!

AAAaaaaarrrrgggghhhh !!! I made a post and it disapeared !!! So, I try again... As I said, I think this scene is really great, but suffer of three problems. The first is that, as Kurka said, your background is too uniform. If you semi-close your eyes, nothing really appear, except the two characters. You should manage more shadow/light or colors contrast by slightly changing material colors of your vegetations, or, as Axe555 suggested, by putting some colored spotlights, or making global light more solar than ambiant. The second is that your characters looks excluded from the scene. There is a lot of vegetations or elements (statue) on the second plan, and nothing in the front plan, except the dancers. You should put one or two elements, little plant for exemple, near the camera, in the right or left down corner of the scene. The third, the most subjective, is an image composition problem. I think you could make your scene larger, put your dancers on the left, as you did, Make your terrain raising from down left to up right and put your temple on top of it. This for manage more space to sky, that could be an important element for the mood of this picture and, more important, for setting up a discussion between characters and temple, the two primordials elements of this scene. You could strenghten the effect by placing a vertical element (tree or statue) on the right of your scene for responding to the verticality of dancers, and leading the eye to the temple. Well, as I'm french, I hope all this is clear in spite of my poor english. As I said before, I really like your scene. This is just a few advices for improving an already excellent job ! :-)

Hey, this is a nice picture and I think your garden is almost there... My question is, and I'm not trying to be funny, do indian girls wear garter belts?? Just curious...

Dear JUST CURIOUS , if my memory doesn't deceive their dresses are usually a little longer so that question will remain open. Apart from that, Agiel to me it looks fine, I've seen mornings with that kind of hazy light overthere , I would even tone down the brightness of the water a little.

Attached Link: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/martin.childs/gamma_test.htm

Hi, Everyone has given great suggestions, and replied with offerings that I had been mulling over, during the night. The default setting for ambient light in Vue, is great for nice atmospheres, but needs to be toned down at the very start of the image making process to get the best results. One thing I would personnally do, is remove the large foreground shadow covering the dancers, as the eye is taken away from them and lead to the brighter background. You could try replacing the shadow with a leafless tree out of view, so that just the branches cast some shadows. The one problem is that the ambient setting for the background, as I mentioned earlier, may need to be turned down if the foreground is brighter. One tip I would give, is open up your image in a paint program and look at the luminosity histogram. If the image is weighted towards the brighter side of it, then you may need to adjust your lighting...or monitor. I have a gamma test at my website, if you need to check your monitor. Keep at it, and keep us updated ;) Cheers

Turn the sunlight more toward sunlight rather than ambient on the slider. I ALWAYS do this, especially if I am starting from a preset atmosphere. You will find that the fir trees and ferns especially are way too ambient in their material (dang things...never like 'em). Turn down the ambience in those materials also. Also you may want to turn on depth of field in your final render and use a bit of blur on the camera...that always increases the sense of depth. And definitely reduce the amount of haze and/or fog if you think you need to, but better yet, darken the color of both (especially haze) and it will not get so bright as it goes away from the camera :). Hope this helps. Laurie

Thanks for all the great comments ! I did not expect to receive so many replies actually. They pointed me to many things that were indeed wrong with the scene. However, I did keep the hazy atmosphere. I spent a lot of time trying out alternative settings and this one worked the best with what I had in mind. This is just a first shot - I am waiting to receive the codes for new plants from eon I purchased last night. They should work better than just the ferns and the plum trees. I hope you like it.

Here is an example of hazy morning in india. I would have liked to get the Taj Mahal but the only model I found was in .max format (which I can't read since I do not have 3ds max). Anybody knows where I could find it in another format ?

Doesn't 3D Cafe have 2 of them? Hmmm...I thought they did. I'll have to check that out. Laurie

Attached Link: http://www.cadalyst.net/3dmodels/architex.html

Can be found here as well, although u may have to hunt through the many models they have :)

I like :) It is very commendable of someone to virtually restart an image on peoples suggestions, to the extent you have, yet still retain their own flavour of the original. Well done agiel, I can't wait to see it with your new plants :D Cheers

Laurie: as far as I know, 3D cafe has only two models. One is the Taj Mahal in .max format. The other one is the indian palace I used in my picture. Rose: thanks for the link but it is a mirror of 3D cafe and has the same models. I guess I will have to buy that one somewhere...

Attached Link: http://www.greatbuildings.com/models/Taj_Mahal_mod.html

Try this one, it's a Design Workshop Lite model but 3DExplorer will read & turn it into an OBJ. If you do an "advanced search" on the site, just check "location" fill in "India" and you'll get links to 22 more Indian buildings.

btw Design Workshop Lite is a freebee, dunno but it might even have a usuable export function.