Stucco Terrain

 This is a piece of landscape that will figure heavily in one of the Chapter Five scenes, but I also shot a corner of it as part of a the background of the party in Chapter 4. 

I made it out of stuccoーtop coat mix for the rougher parts and base coat mix for the smoother sections.  Stucco is not a traditional model making material, I live in California so I already had the tools and partial bags of mix.  Around here everything is covered in stucco.  This picture is from just after I put on the primer.

  

And this picture is shows an intermediate stage where the model isn't done, but the piece of it I need for Chapter 4 is good enough.  The rail fence is will be taken off later, since I won't need it in the next chapter.  It's only held on with some dabs of hot glue.  The brown is old house paint I had, and the grays on the rocks are airbrushed craft acrylics.  

And here, somewhat anticlimactically, is one of the pictures I used making my background matte.

Two points which I should mention (nerd stuff follows): 1) Shooting models in general are less detailed than other sorts of models.  They actually look worse with too much detail.  2) The scale on this model gets smaller as you go back.  This is because I'm planning to force the perspective. 3) The background is out of focus.  Physical lenses like the 50mm prime I'm using here (or the human eye) have a limited depth of field. Blender, on the other hand, has an infinite DOF by default.  I can set the f-stop in Blender to mimic that effect, but I usually don't.  Most of the panels that seem to have an out-of focus background have it added procedurally at composite time.  The problem comes when I match the focal lengths between a photograph and a render and have different DOF's.   In this particular case it isn't a problem because I like the mountain to be a little blurry.  If I needed to simulate the "infinite DOF" of Blender, though, I would need to take multiple photographs at different focus points, then composite them together. 

There's a lot to think about when you work in meat-space, but I think it's worth it for the look that physical objects give my panels.