Background layer
I needed a different type of lighting setup to the foreground stuff, and that's one of the reasons why I created it as a separate file

Building a background
One thing that takes a real lot of time is a thing called rendering. Rendering is the process of getting the computer to turn all your modelling, lighting, texturing and other stuff into a finished image. That can tie up the computer for hours or even days. So if you can cut your render time then it's worth it.

That reflective wavy sea water takes forever to render so I just masked out the bottom of the image with some solid black. After all, that bit's going to be covered up with the forerground stuff.

This background has already had some tricks applied to it, to give the impression that you can see through the water to the sandy bottom. In the original render you couldn't see through it.

Here's the foreground layer which goes directly above the background layer.

Building a foreground scene
Here are the rodents and the boat. I used a special kind of lighting called HDRI for this.

HDRI stands for 'high dynamic range image'. Still doesn't make much sense does it? Well, using an HDRI setup lets you light a scene in pretty much the same way that nature does. You see, in the real world, objects are cast with reflected light from everything around them, and those reflected rays of light give an object subtle tones and glows which we think of as being 'realistic lighting'. In the computer setup I used here, the HDRI part of the lighting refers to the fact that I use a special kind of super-intense photo, a high-dynamic-range one, wrapped around the scene, to illuminate it.

Extreme foreground
These gum leaves, with the suggestion of light shining through them, were placed on top of everything. That grey and white checker board pattern you see here is something that Photoshop does. That's its way of showing the bits where I haven't put anything in yet.

Gum leaves over the top
Finally, some gum leaves were put on top, and deliberately blurred to make them out of focus. Putting extreme foreground things out of focus simulates the way cameras and our eyes work, and lets you draw attention to the things in focus at the centre of the scene. Click here if you want to find out how I made these gum leaves.

All the layers together
When you get to this stage you hope it works, because sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the lighting looks too different between the different parts of the scene. Or sometimes the perspective differs. So it takes a lot of planning to make it all work together

Finishing it off
I could have built the entire scene in one very complicated file, and rendered it in one go. The software I use, called Cinema 4D, can handle it. But when you're working to a deadline it's often better to think about what your needs are and how to get there most efficiently. Rendering the file in one go would have taken my computer hundreds of hours to finish the scene. And it would have taken me a lot of extra time in setting it up too.