Martian Landscape in VUE

The Inspiration and Draft


I've been watching a lot of that British comedy series by Ricky Gervais and Co. called 'An Idiot Abroad'. Particularly, the episode in which Karl Pilkington goes to New Zealand to live on a Desert Island, I believe it was the first episode of season 2. So he's on his way to an island and along the way is this aerial shot of a gorgeous hazy, martian-like landscape. Only, this was on earth. It mostly comprised of hilly terrain (a few very large bumps here and there) and a lot of haze. 


So I went into Vue and started recreating my version of it - or rather whatever I had remember from that shot, really. 

Before compositing in Nuke

So I came up with that (above) terrain and I was, as always, astonished by Vue's ability to pick up so much detail. After I had achieved this sort of edgy terrain - modifying it using the powerful function editor - I figured that for a still image it looked quite decent with an un-textured terrain. Of course, this isn't even close to the effect that I wanted to achieve so I left the latter for Nuke to handle. 


The Final Composite

After compositing in Nuke.

The above landscape shows the finished (composited) scene. The Grade node being my favorite one in Nuke, I used that to my advantage to get the orange hue. Then applied a blur to the terrain in the horizon. 

About the blur

This was the tricky part as I wasn't sure if adding a blur was worth it. It sort of doesn't change anything but on a magnified level you will be able to see some difference. Most of depth effect was due to Vue's aerial perspective, but I just couldn't help myself and had to fiddle around with Nuke's blur node. All in all, it's done!