The New and Improved Snowy Mountains(With better FOG!)

Well I had to revisit my snowy mountains since I now have a better understanding of how to work with volumes(fog) and boy does it make a big difference. To me at least it does. Before I could only really make the fog apparent if I was doing a scene that was backlit by the sun. I didn't really know how to just get some general distance for to look right.

Here's a couple previous examples and you can see on the first one, there simply isn't any atmospheric perspective and on the second, like I mentioned, it's backlit by the sun. I'm pretty stoked about figuring this out because fog is sort of like lens flares, it just makes everything look better. If you even notice in movies or tv, everything is always foggy, doesn't matter if their indoors or what, throw some fog in there, and it looks good.

I also touched things up in Photoshop and added a little post work on this image which helps a bit too. The clouds are composited in, they aren't part of the 3D.

This gif swaps between the raw 3D and the 2D comp work in Photoshop. It's subtle, but I think it adds a lot.

That's the end of today's art installment. I also just wanted to mention the video done by Steemit talking about SMT's and Communities. It's here if you haven't seen it.

Just want to say, I'm so pumped for Communities. When @andrarchy said that in the future your landing page will be more like a page of your subscribed topics, that was music to my ears. IMHO the content discovery problem here is the NUMBER ONE problem with Steemit and other Frontends. Even something like Steempeak which is a lot nicer to look at, doesn't really solve this huge issue. I think if Steem can manage to dramatically improve content discovery, we win, period. That's it, all you whales start looking for Yacht's on sale, and don't forget to invite your buddy @midlet to the party.

A lot of people say there's no good content on Steem, but I think that's wrong, I think there's a fair amount of good content, you just CAN'T FIND IT. It was a little while ago, but I remember posting a comment on someone's post and I forget exactly how it happened that they saw some of my art and they replied "You're an artist???" This was at a time when I was mostly posting about Steem, but to me that was just showing a failure of the current UX that someone could be following me and not know I'm an artist lol.

So yea, I'm more excited about Communities than SMT's. SMT's are the beginning of giving people powerful tools to hopefully make something great. They themselves won't really do much, it's going to then be up to someone to make something awesome and use that tech to empower it. Who knows how long that could take, but Communities sounds like it could drastically improve the user experience here, and as some of you know, I think that's Steem's #1 problem.

That's about all I've got for today folks. See you in the next post.