Shot 5 Full Render Preview
Aak's reached his climax and everyone below is paying the price for it! There's only one shot left to do for Micro Management before it's ready for release. Thank you all for your patience on this one!
Using Depth of Field
One of the most powerful tools to portray scale, especially when talking about extremely small scales like in Micro Management, is depth of field. Of course, it's good to know when to actually use this tool to direct the eye.
Depth of field (DOF) is describes how a camera focuses on a subject using F-stop, aperture, and subject depth. In a real camera, DOF is a lot harder to get reeled in properly. Blender, on the other hand, gives us easy access to a comprehensive DOF controls for a camera right in the viewport.
The two biggest settings to pay attention to are the "Focal Distance"/"Focus on Object" and the "F-Stop".
For shots where the subject's distance does not move and the focus subject does not change, I recommend just using the focus distance. For shots opposite of that, I recommend focusing on an object in your scene. F-Stop will control the intensity of the blur based on the distance to the subject. The further the distance, the higher the F-Stop should be. If you want to show your DOF "limit" (the focus distance), you can check the box in the camera settings called "Limits". This will display a yellow plus where the focus distance is.
Something important to mention is the concept of "deep focus". This is the concept of using such a large DOF that there is no discernible blur in the camera. When working in larger scenes where the subject is far away, you should absolutely stick to deep focus. Adding depth of field to larger scenes can make said scenes appear smaller than they really are, demolishing the effect of scale. That's why I've chosen deep focus for shots in Micro Management where the camera is located in the city. While the city IS small from Aak's perspective, the people in the city are viewing him and surrounding apartment as gargantuan.
Faking Detail and Instancing
A huge limitation of working in 3D are the specs of your workstation. This is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to GPU rendering, as you're limited by your GPU's VRAM rather than your system memory. Faking detail and instancing becomes an essential part of optimizing scenes to make them more efficient for renders.
Image Planes
One great way to fake said detail is to use flat images with height or normal maps to fake depth. The dirt texture below is a completely flat texture on a single plane. This effect CAN break, but as long as the camera doesn't get close to 90 degrees perpendicular to the plane the illusion holds.
Instancing
I'm not sure if this is a concept that I've gone over before, but it's vital to optimizing scenes. Instancing works by taking stored object data in memory and referencing that data in another part of the scene. The only things that can be changed for an instance is the object's world space location, rotation, and scale.
The benefit of this is that instead of having to load an object's data into memory for every new copy, Blender will only load a single "instance" of that data into memory. That way it can be pulled out later with different transformations in the scene. This is a great way to have hundreds of thousands of higher poly trees in a scene during render time. Or in this case, billboard trees.