OUDF603: Animated Set Progress | Set Dressing

At this part of the stage I wanted to accessorise the set by adding little things such as 

• 2 layers of animated fog positioned at separate areas of the 3D space, one for the foreground elements & the other for the background elements.
• Trees.
• Animated Grass.
• Sun Flare.
• Coal Power Plant Silos with Smoke particles emitting.

Adding the fog I used the noise node, the fog helps animate the background & give it a sense of movement. The noise node can be used for other textures such as clouds, dense smoke, fog etc. The animation was simply translated in the 'x' position as I required the movement to move slowly from left to write. 

Above is the first layer of fog added into the foreground elements.

To sell the scene & make it more believable, I decided to rotoscope out the area of the fog that was covering the sky and have it hover over the mountains alone. I added a root shape in-between the noise card and the scene card, it already has an alpha channel output into it therefore I don't need to worry about transparency issues. To add the root shape I used the bezier shape which is capable of drawing curves and sharp corners. Below is an illustration of my rotoscope:  

The next step was to add animated grass into the scene, I created it using paint effects keeping in mind that It was going to be used in the foreground. Animated Paint Effects required me to render using Maya Software, I usually render everything using Mental Ray.  

Above is the illustration of the grass paint effect. 

Below are more set dressing assets used on the scene