Subtitles of the Movie

You know, I write children's books as well as do comic books for older people and I have the same issues writing kids books as I do working on artwork for children. What works for other things doesn't necessarily work for children's things. Children's things tend to be a little bit brighter, more colorful, more whimsical so that's why we had such a difficult time finding a right solution as far as the lighting. If it was a regular, old desert scene with real people, it would be a lot easier, in my opinion, because that's a little bit easier to accomplish than trying to create another world that's full of whimsy and doesn't exist and has swirls on mountains. So having said that, of course I would continue on my own to explore the lights. But for now I want to show you how to change the environment itself. As you can see, in our render we have the typical little gradient back there. Let's go ahead and put in an image that I have prepared for you guys. You can find it in the Work Files folder in a folder called Images. So what I want to do here is with this guy I want to click on Environment and twirl it open. As you can see, if I click on the Eyeball where it says Environment, I hide that gradient. So I'm going to bring that back with Environment selected. Let's go up here where it says Add Layer and we're going to add an image map. And I'm going to load a new image and once again, it's in the Images Folder. It's called Starry Night. This is something I painted in Photoshop very quickly. Go ahead and open that and you'll notice that it is now in the background. But we really can't see it that well. So we need to do one thing to change that. We're going to change how it's actually projected in our scene. And if you look down here, we have the ability to use an alpha channel if we have one. Now, this doesn't have an alpha channel because it's in the background. You're going to also adjust the Gamma or the midtones of your image as well. If you want to, you can invert the colors of it. So you can invert the red, invert the green and invert the blue. You can also use the High Value to change the quality of the image. For example, if I drop this down to 40, notice it gets a little bit desaturated so I'll go ahead and put that back at a hundred. We can also click on Texture Locator and where it says Projection, we have a Projection Type. Currently it's Spherical, which means it's around the entire image. We can also change it to Cubic, Box, but the one we want to go for is simply called Front. Front will put the image right where we want it and see the whole thing. And all of a sudden we get this really magical feeling for this image. Instead of having that gradient back there, we have a custom background, which is pretty cool. Now from here we can continue to play with the lighting or you can go ahead and just play around with the textures themselves. I'm going to do a render and let's see what we wind up with. As you can see, we have a really cool background that's kind of matching the qualities of the water and also the blue qualities of the mountains. And this would work great as a backdrop in a children's book or even an animation. So I hope you guys enjoyed this project, taking what's typically known as a realistic thing like mountains and turning them into something that could be in a dream, in a children's book, an animation, coloring book or something like that. So I hope you enjoyed it. Take care.