Final year project update 4

In this update I would love to say more about how I lit and rendered my scene, but I am organizing my submission instead. I would like to say that of my lighting experience the best progressions came around when I began to use an HDR for the fill light. Having an area light emit diffuse gave me nice falloff, while having the directional cast shadows and emit specular was good for render time. I have never done this before and was some advice I picked up when I sought advice from a professional lighting junior I know. Separating the AO but combining the specular was a result of the following...

A main issue I had was with the depth of field in my shot. I haven't mentioned it until now because I found a solution fairly quickly. Normally I would use a depth pass from maya in nuke to defocus in Z. In this instance because of small leaves and their overlapping at different depths a depth pass was really not working. I couldnt afford to sample high enough to get the edges to line up. I did something I had never done before. I used Maya physical lens shader on my shot camera. This renders out a burnt it depth defocus. It added quite a bit to my render time, but it worked in the comp, especially as my comp's softening helped the undersampled areas.

Next time I should render out several passes of particles, at incremental depth slices, or individually (with Ids maybe) allowing the defocus plugin more chance of looking nice.

After all I decided that the leaves looked very stiff and rigid and did in fact need to deform, so I cut new faces into them and I used two wave deformers to give the instanced geometry some curvy animation. This looked a lot better and was simple and quick last minute addition.