I'm curious how you did your skybox? Custom mesh and gradient texture? Additional layers for clouds and stars? Any light you could shed would be great as I'm very much into custom skies these days.
I also second Moose's thoughts - the scene tends to overwhelm with color and light for that matter, and your focal point starts to lose importance. Concerning saturation, work color into your focal point and soften around it. Like the value of the light coming from the pumpkin, the saturation will also add importance to that focal element. Like saturation everywhere won't help your key objects pop.
One of the things you should think about is the influence of your focal light source. I feel that there's a lot of light spilling across the image and the drama is stifled a bit. Again, Moose's paint-over shows some great things - light from the pumpkin kissing the tree but the backside is almost silhouetted against the sky. Watch the travel of that focal light, maybe you could try to get gentle hints of it on your foreground elements but let it drift to darker tones so that your foreground frames your composition better. Contrast is needed.
Lastly, I might would play with the fog a bit to get more scattered atmosphere through the moon light. Play with your directional light positioning and then mess with the inscattering color vs. the opposite light color and intenstiy. Doing so will give the illusion that your moonlight is sifting through a heavy night and we'll feel that gradient from the moon to the opposite side. You can adjust the influence of each side by messing with the terminator angle.
I'm curious how you did your skybox? Custom mesh and gradient texture? Additional layers for clouds and stars? Any light you could shed would be great as I'm very much into custom skies these days.
Oh man, I totally cave-manned it. I made a gigantic sphere, cut it in half, UV'd it, made a tiling sky/stars texture (no clouds or moon). Then, I made the moon and clouds their own alphas, billboards just floating very far away against the half-sphere. The light-blue gradient on the horizon, is just a gigantic cylinder with an alpha.
This is a way to make a pretty picture, probably not viable for a real production workflow.
Replies
I'm curious how you did your skybox? Custom mesh and gradient texture? Additional layers for clouds and stars? Any light you could shed would be great as I'm very much into custom skies these days.
I also second Moose's thoughts - the scene tends to overwhelm with color and light for that matter, and your focal point starts to lose importance. Concerning saturation, work color into your focal point and soften around it. Like the value of the light coming from the pumpkin, the saturation will also add importance to that focal element. Like saturation everywhere won't help your key objects pop.
One of the things you should think about is the influence of your focal light source. I feel that there's a lot of light spilling across the image and the drama is stifled a bit. Again, Moose's paint-over shows some great things - light from the pumpkin kissing the tree but the backside is almost silhouetted against the sky. Watch the travel of that focal light, maybe you could try to get gentle hints of it on your foreground elements but let it drift to darker tones so that your foreground frames your composition better. Contrast is needed.
Lastly, I might would play with the fog a bit to get more scattered atmosphere through the moon light. Play with your directional light positioning and then mess with the inscattering color vs. the opposite light color and intenstiy. Doing so will give the illusion that your moonlight is sifting through a heavy night and we'll feel that gradient from the moon to the opposite side. You can adjust the influence of each side by messing with the terminator angle.
Best of luck to you, great work!
-Jon
Oh man, I totally cave-manned it. I made a gigantic sphere, cut it in half, UV'd it, made a tiling sky/stars texture (no clouds or moon). Then, I made the moon and clouds their own alphas, billboards just floating very far away against the half-sphere. The light-blue gradient on the horizon, is just a gigantic cylinder with an alpha.
This is a way to make a pretty picture, probably not viable for a real production workflow.