Pagoda in the Rain Fly-Through

First, I modeled a pagoda using traditional mesh techniques. I wanted to create a kind of “lush anime” effect, rather than photographic realism, so I kept the texturing to a minimum and focused mostly on solid forms. I put each level of the pagoda at a different layer to make it easier to detail the insides later:



Next, I modelled the roof tiles individually by duplcating, joining, skewing, and tapering a simple teardrop-shaped plane tile. Then I extruded the tiles downward ever so slightly so that when you approach them at the level they appear to have some slight volume (versus a paper-thin plane). Once finished applying a little texture and some lighting, I was reasonably happy with the building. For terrain, I used fractal subdivsion on a plane, pulled it around a bit, and applied a fractal pattern with graduated colorbands between brown and green to give the appearance of uneven patches of grass and earth. Finally, I added a scattering of mesh fibers to simulate delicate spring grass. Overall, I am quite pleased with the effect of the pagoda on a summer day:



To create the illusion of ambient occlusion, I turned on the mist effect and tuned it so that it obscured the “hills” in the background, giving greater depth to the horizon. Then I created concentric spheres and applied the cloud texture to modify the alpha channel, effectively simulating some realistic fog. I did the same for a hemisphere that encompasses the entire scene, which when set against a grey-to-black gradient backdrop created a storm cloud effect.

Then, as I said, I followed a process similar to feeblemind’s tutorial to create a plane that emits raindrops. I made them shadeless; essentially solid white drops composed from five vertices and some smoothing that fall down in a random pattern. Then I rigged squares around the edges of each layer of the rooftop, and played with the emission properties a bit to get a nice dripping effect. Finally, I added a translucent plane of murky “water” that intersects the ground plane at its lowest points (just like real water, which pools at the lowerst point) to create puddles. I played a lot with the water effects plugin on this plane and also a translucent copy of the tiles which I superimposed just above (along the Z-axis) the real tiles. This way, I can literally turn on or off the rain effects by hiding objects in certain layers. Finally, I played with the gamma and saturation settings on the render to get an effect I liked:


Overall, I’m happy with the end effect and learned a lot about how to create the illusion of atmosphere in a scene using lighting, animated plugins, color correction, and other tricks of the trade.