The Ultimate Scenebuilding Course

Introduction

In this guide, we will be showing you the ins and outs of scenebuilding. This guide is
aimed for the already somewhat experienced SFM users, people who know 3 point lights, the
power of radius, and the people who know how to work a camera. Scenebuilding is important
because at a certain point, maps won’t cut it. Scenebuilding isn’t something that anyone can just
pick up and be good at. Like all other things in SFM, it takes a lot of time and practice to
understand how to be “good”. So don’t stress if you don’t get something you like on your first try.

This guide will talk about composition, lighting, color, and camera placement. Before we
get into the actual guide, and I have to stress this, you don’t need all the fancy scenebuilding
packs to scenebuild. The ones provided in this guide will be more than what you’ll need. If you
somehow don’t have room in your PC, or just don’t feel like downloading giant scenebuidling
packs, that’s fine. You can still be great. We will still be giving you some of the resources just in
case you want to get the full experience.
 The Ultimate Mask’s Scenebuilding pack:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/obgzlhcxisnz1bb/The_Mask%27s_scenebuild_pack_all_in_one.7z/f
ile

“About 36 gigs of high quality props, compressed to 6 gigs. The ultimate 1 stop shop for

scenebuilding props.”

Contagion pack:

https://mega.nz/#!q19xwLAC!pk2h44gKO_MLek_KeGlQl28rCKX8DPeF60sSIA_hulE

“Around 2,000 props ready to use in SFM. Not as large as Masks Pack. Better for people who

have no experience in scenebuilding at all.”

Huge Void XL:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=376809574

“A great map for very large scenebuilds. No lighting, huge amount of space. This is almost a
necessity for scenebuilds.”

Dishonored Skydomes:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/bro1p00s6238aqm/skydomes_tomato_sent_me.rar/file

“Great sky models, around 25 different sky textures.”

Scenebuilding

Mutation-16, 10.31.2020, mars-5200.

Scenebuilding and composition

Composition, just like lighting - which we’re going to talk about a bit later, is what makes
or breaks the picture. As we mentioned earlier we won’t go into the basics as this tutorial is
aimed for somewhat experienced SFM users. But we are going to start at the beginning, and
that means you’re gonna load your huge_void and place your camera, that for the sake of the
workflow you won’t move at all!

Why not, you might ask yourself?

Well scenebuilding is all about the perspective, stuff that seems very far away might
actually be close, but due to the trickery with resizing and lighting, it might seem like it’s very far
away, and moving the camera very late into the scenebuilding might break that effect. Although,
you should consider keeping different angles in mind, just in case you want to make some slight
changes.
 You will keep your composition in mind while scenebuilding your scene, so you will start
with the objects that are going to be points of interest.

Behind the scenes of the “Homeworld” poster, where you can see how everything falls together.

So, you got your camera ready, you're good to go and you might be wondering what’s
next. Well, it’s the fun part, and that’s scenebuidling! You will slowly start loading your models in
to make the scene you want. We recommend you work with the two viewports, as that’s gonna
make things easier for you. In one viewport you will have your camera - there you will be able to
see the final product - while the other viewport is gonna be used for both work camera, and
lighting later on.
 For this scene, the camera was set at 24mm, and I first started working on the
foreground where the main part of the picture was taking place. Setting up FOV early on is as
important as not moving the camera while scenebuilding.

By slowly loading models into the scene and properly resizing them, I had a rough draft
of what the playground was gonna look like. Next step was to slowly load models that are gonna
make for the background, and again I did that using a work camera on the secondary viewport
while looking at the primary viewport to match the size of the models.

In order to achieve the feeling of scale or should I say proper distance, you want to
resize your objects and you want to use vo lights for the fog or haze in the distance.
vo lights we're gonna touch upon a bit later under the Lighting section. As for the model
placement, don't worry if something is floating in the air in your work camera viewport. The only
important thing is what your main camera sees, and how that fits the scene. The more
The more you do this, the better you will become at it.
View of the background from the work camera.

After setting up the foreground and background, you will have your basic composition.
In most cases if it’s a “landscape” you should be able to breakdown in 3 parts “foreground,
middle ground, and background”.

Tip: You can resize and rotate

pieces of the terrain in the
background to make hills,
or bumps.

You want your main subjects to properly stand out, but you also want the rest of the
scene to be attractive, and that’s where the detail comes around. You shouldn’t place grass,
rocks, or any other props around willy nilly just for the sake of it. Every little piece of terrain you
place around should make sense and should blend together with the rest of the scene.

Your detail should make sense both environment wise and story wise.
Examples of the detail: books, school bags, trash, flowers, benches, etc..

In the picture above, you can see a ladder in the background. Why would it be there?
Well there is a can of paint on top of it, and graffiti on a school building, so someone is cleaning
the wall of the school. That’s a small example of a detail that works both to fill the scene and to
give it a sense of a backstory and world building.

But you also must keep in mind SFM has a memory counter. The memory counter is
located on the bottom right of your SFM and is used to monitor how much memory your props
and models are taking up. SFM has a memory limit of around 3500 MB, and if SFM hits that
limit, It crashes. You have to make sure you don’t use too many unnecessary props in a
scene.Try to limit detail to only the foreground, and try to use lower quality props in the middle
ground and background.

Tip: Restart SFM every now and then to clear

memory which isn’t being used. Props you look at
in the model browser will remain in memory, even
if you didn’t spawn them in.
Cats And Robots, 7.10.2020, Atlas/RedLine2311.
Kazaki, 9.8.2020, Memesoon/TeslaMen.
Terrain Blending And Shapes

Sooner or later you’re gonna work on a scene that will use some sort of terrain. Be it dirt
terrain, snowy terrain, or grassy terrain. A great thing to know when using terrain models such
as those is how to properly resize them and make bumps, so the scene looks more natural.
Lot’s of newer scenebuilders suffer from flat terrain when working on landscape-like scenes.

Here is a quick example on how you can avoid such things:

As you can see above, it’s all about perspective. Resizing, and rotating the terrain a
certain direction, then moving it or blending it with the rest of the terrain pieces is gonna make
your terrain look more natural. Again having two viewports really helps with that.

Another important thing to know when working with terrain is terrain blending. As the
word itself says, terrain blending is basically blending of two different terrain models by placing
them on top of, or inside of each other, so that the model’s bumps and gaps may be filled with
the other model. Here is the example of that in action:
 So as you can see, working with the terrain just like with the rest of the scenebuilding is
all in the perspective, you want to fake your way into making the terrain look more realistic and
detailed. Working with two viewports, and looking at the references is really gonna help you out
with that.

In the scene above I used snow and dirt as an example of terrain blending, but you can do it
with any kind of other environment, grass and dirt, different kinds of sand in the desert scenes
and so on. It’s going to make your scene feel more natural and alive.
Camera Settings

Every scene obviously requires a camera, and we mentioned earlier that the one you
spawn you won't move for the benefit of the workflow.
However, you will be touching some of the camera settings, fov is obviously one of those,
broken fov usually breaks the entire scene.

Other than the fov, settings you immediately want to touch are bloom and ao.
Bloom if you're working on a poster you want to have turned off, sfm's bloom isn't the best and
Later on in the post we will be showing you how to do proper bloom in photoshop.

AO (Ambient occlusion) you want to have set at very low (0.001).

The point of the ao is to make geometry appear much more three-dimensional.
Parts of a model which are meant to be shaded but aren't reached by dynamic shadows receive
proper attenuation.
However with proper lighting you don't need it, the whole lot of models you will be using from
various packs have ao way too intense on the default settings.
Your safest bet is to always have it set as we mentioned above.
Overlay

Overlay option is placed at the bottom of your Timeline, and it looks like this:

This one is currently being used for “material overlays”, in order to set one up you have
to right click the empty Overlay tab and click on Add Clip to Track. From there you will click on
your track and click on Show in Element Viewer. Inside the Element Viewer, on the left-hand
side under “New Clip”, you’ll see a line called “material”, and right of it you’ll see a name
followed by a box with three dots in it. Clicking on it, you’ll be greeted with a window to choose a
new material to use as your overlay. The SFM Workshop has many overlays to download and
use!
 Overlays are usable for all sorts of things, be it composition grids, or aspect ratio bars. I
use the aspect ratio of 4:3 a lot. While scenebuilding, having black bars close the empty portion
of the scene helps me a lot.
“Example of overlay usage”

Grouping and stacking

Another Important thing you want to do is to group your models and objects. Having your
objects grouped and stacked together is not only gonna make your session more organized, but
it’s going to help you look for and identify where each part of the scene is. If your scene is too
cluttered, maybe disabling all trees or all rocks from view will make it easier for you to edit and
move other parts.

To enable grouping, simply go to the left-hand side of your screen and look for a
“cogwheel”, or gear, button. It’s big, hard to miss. It’ll drop down some options. Enable “Scene
hierarchy” and voilá!
Final words

Scenebuilding like everything else is all about practice. It’s gonna take some time for you
to get used to achieving that feel of the depth in the picture, focus on trying to produce a couple
of smaller scenebuilds first, before you take on something of a bigger scale, don’t get
overwhelmed and make the biggest scenebuild there is. This all takes time and practice.

Hopefully the part above gave you an idea on what exactly is happening behind the
scenes of a scenebuild. So you now know what to do with the camera, you’ve got some tips on
viewports and grouping/stacking.

For the next part, we’re gonna assume you made your first simple scenebuild. Now we’ll
move on to lighting.
Lighting

Introduction

As mentioned earlier, lighting itself could be a tutorial on it’s own, and it is! So, before we
head into it, we’re gonna recommend you watch XieAngel’s tutorial which you can see here:

[SFM] Step-by-Step #2 - Scenebuild Lighting

We will try to explain some of the stuff from the above’s video as we go along.
Lights

So, let’s say you have your scene finished, and now you want to move onto the lighting,
where do you start? Well, you want to match the lighting with the sky colour and any other light
sources that might be visible in the scene.

Keep in mind that SFM’s lighting is limited, and what we’re doing is we’re trying to get
close to how actual lights work and react, however, we will never be, nor could we be, 100%
accurate. Scenebuilding in SFM is all about imitating real life with artistic vision.

As mentioned above, you’re gonna match your lights with the sky, and any other light
sources present in the scene. First, you’ll want to start with the ambient light.
Ambient

As the name suggests, Ambient Lighting attempts to imitate the effects of the sky (or any
other major light source) on the scene. It’ll usually look like a very dim, very soft light across the
entire scene, with the color of the sky.

To set a proper ambient light, you’re gonna spawn a shadowed light and place it far up in
the scene, making sure it covers and reaches all visible objects in your scene. We recommend
you go above the highest object in your scene, about double or triple the height.

Settings wise, it’s always gonna depend on what kind of a scene you’re working on, but
for the sake of this tutorial we’re gonna look at the picture above, and pretend that you’re
working on an outdoor landscape.

Your settings should be something like this:

Intensity: It all depends on the type of the weather the scene is set on. Remapping it and
adding a 0 at the end, or removing a 0 always helps to determine how bright it’ll be.
FOV: You have to remap to around 150 to 170, and crank it all the way up.
Radius: Remap it to 2000 for a scene such as the one below. For a smaller scene, consider
using less radius. Also, remember that Radius only activates once you move to the clip editor.
Make sure your sample number is high and that you wait for it to render the preview.
ShadowFilterSize: 0.01 or lower.
ShadowAtten: 0.01, you can also turn it off completely.
MaxDistance: Just like intensity, remap it and add one extra 0 to the end, then crank it all the
way up.
MinDistance: All the way up, unless you have objects *really close* to the light.
QuadraticAttenuation: Leave it at default. Don’t use ConstantAtten for wide area ambient
lights, as this causes the light intensity to be biased strongly at the edges, almost like a giant
ring light.
FarZAtten: Add an extra 0 at the end and crank it up.

Hopefully your light now covers your entire scene, like the one seen below. If it doesn’t, don’t
worry. Mess around, move it around, see what you can do to help. For the colours, I went with
dark blue. Later on I will cast purple (Yes, purple!) sun light to match the sky and to create the
atmosphere I was going for.
Come, Son, 8.9.2019, XieAngel.

Old West, 15.6.2019, Scotchlover.

Sun
Sun light or a moon light depending on the scene you’re working on, is present in any outdoor
scenario unless you’re going for very overcast weather where it’s almost non present.

Depending on the size of your scenebuild you might need to use multiple sun lights.
“Same goes for the ambient light”

You want to match your sunlight with the skydome, so you want to spawn a shadowed light and
place it outside the skydome at the angle from where the sun is cast on the skydome,
sometimes it might be hidden so you can improvise as long as it makes sense.

As for the settings.

Intensity will typically be lowered quite a lot - edit this after turning on ConstantAttenuation.
Turning on ConstantAtten when leaving Intensity at default will make it searingly bright. Remap
the Intensity slider - values I prefer are min 0, max 20.
FOV will typically be extremely low. You’ll have to place your sunlight faaar away to cover the
scene, but your shadows will be nice and parallel.
Radius should be set to whatever is aesthetically pleasing. It can be almost any value,
depending on how far the light is from the scene, or how much the sun is being blocked by
clouds or haze. Note - the higher the radius, the higher the sun light FoV, otherwise some light
samples might ‘miss’ the subject.
ShadowFilterSize should be 0.01 (If your shadow res is set to 8192 it should be set anywhere
from 0.001 to 0.005. But not 0.)
shadowAtten: A light with constantatten enabled does not get affected by shadowatten.
ConstantAttenuation: Max the slider.
FarZAtten and Maxdistance: You want to remap and add another 0, just like with the ambient
light
Mindistance is a value you’ll typically want to raise above its default, especially if the light is far
away from everything, as it improves the fidelity of the depth map used for drawing shadows. If
the sunlight is outside the map, or beyond a skydome, you can remap the slider to a higher
value and raise mindistance for the light to ignore these boundaries and begin casting in the
map/skydome.

After you have all of that set up, your scene should look something like this.
“Scene’s lighting is slowly but surely coming together”
Strange Occurrences. 10.26.2020. mars-5200

Dark Ages, 19.8.2018. DanStrogg

Bounce

Bounce lighting, as the word itself says, is the light that bounces off surfaces that it hits. Without
bounce lighting, your scene would look very unnatural and dark.

“If you’re working on a desert scene, your bounce lighting would be of yellowish color since it’ll
be the same color as the desert sand that it hits”

Your goal with the bounce lights is to match them with the surroundings, with the color of
the objects around the scene, especially the terrain.

You will almost always have your main bounce light set at the ground level and cast
upon the scene, opposite of where the sunlight hits.

Now settings wise, a bounce light is a bit different than the ambient and the sun.
You are more open to how you’re gonna set it up, and after you’ve done the sun and the
ambient light you will understand how the said settings for those work, therefore you will be able
to be more experimental with the bounce.

Some people have it shadowless, some have it with shadows on, bounce light is a fill
light as well. It should light up the dark spots in the scene, for the scene above the bounce light
was going for more of an artistic look while still litting up some of the dark spots.
“This is how the scene looks like with the bounce lights on, robot, car and other props are more
lit”

In the scene above the fov was set high, alongside the maxdistance so it reached a wider area
of the parking.
There were multiple bounce lights placed around the scene, some in the foreground, and some
in the background.
“Mechanic scene breakdown. 17.3.2020. Atlas/Redline2311”
Volumetrics

Volumetric lights are completely different from what we talked about up until now. Even though
you probably already know what those do, for the sake of it, I will go through it one more time.

Volumetrics when enabled produce what’s known as godrays, they can also produce shadows.
You can control both the intensity and the amount of those rays in sfm, like everything else you
can also remap all of it.

In scenebuilding, volumetrics are mostly used as fog or mist, since vo lights can make for a
better fog than the map fog you can load through the commands.
In the scene above the VO lights were used as an atmosphere pass.

They were set to produce both mist, and air noise in the further distance, and settings for those
are rather simple.
You want to have your intensity as low as possible 0.001, since you want to avoid the light to
actually contribute light to the scene. You only want the volumetric aspect of the light.
You’ll also want to remap the volumetric intensity to a ridiculous value, such as 1000, so you
have better control over it. Noisestrength should also be set to 0, unless you like the shifting
appearance that high noisestrength adds… which is more suitable for animations, not posters.
If you want an uneven look to the mist/fog, use a gobo texture.

Now like with everything else, it’s all gonna depend on the scene, and how much the scene asks
for the vo lights; you want to match the colour of those with the rest of the scene as well.

Another important thing with the VO lights is the placement, and where exactly do you place
them around your scene, sometimes it’s gonna be cast from under the ground, sometimes from
the sky and so on.

When properly placed, those can be used for a range of things.

“Now with the volumetrics placed around the scene the scene has much more depth and
atmosphere”

Volumetrics bring us to the end of this very brief lighting guide, and I can’t recommend you
enough Xie’s tutorials.
Like with the composition don’t be afraid to experiment with the lights, it’s all in the trial and
error.

We showed you some of the basics, and how you can set up the lights around the scene, why
the settings are important, and now it’s up to you to experiment with it in your own scenes.

Now we’re gonna move on to another important piece and that’s override materials.
Override Materials

$Phongboost

Probably the most famous command out of the bunch, you’ve seen it used to hell.
Phong provides diffuse reflections that are masked by a texture to control its intensity.

So what phong does is produce diffuse reflections.

Those reflections can be very important when you’re scenebuilding, it’s gonna give another
layer of depth to the picture.

“Example of phong commands in action”

“Car and the robot without the phong commands”

So as you can see phong commands can make props around your scene much prettier, almost
every prop in the scene above has phong commands to some degree, a good example is the
concrete on the ground as well.
Another important thing is that you don’t overkill it.

In order to turn phongboost on, you’re gonna right click the model you want to apply it on, and
you’re gonna click override material.
After that you’re gonna right click the model again and got to, Show in Element Viewer and
then mark Model

After that, when you open your element viewer, right next to the Animation Set Editor You will
be able to see materials of the model you chose.

Now that Mirado model has a lot of skins, so you have to mark the skin your model is set on,
and then you can apply the phongboost command.
The next thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna right click the material you want, then you’re
gonna go to the Add Attribute and you’re gonna choose float.

In there you’re gonna write $phongboost then you’re gonna add another attribute under float
and you’re gonna type $phongexponent.

There is another command you can use: $phongfresnelranges. Fresnel controls how strong
the phong reflections are based on the viewing angle. This command will also affect envmap
reflections.

Now you will have phong commands where you can type the amount of numbers that’s gonna
determine the strength of the phongboost.
There isn’t a said number that everyone uses, and it all depends on the scene, lighting and what
exactly you’re doing. Some of the props might have 10, some 100 and some 1000.
Phongexponent controls the size of the diffuse reflections. Something glossier, such as
polished metal, will have a higher value than something more diffuse, like cloth.
So just like with the phongboost, it’s all up to you to determine the right amount of
phongexponent. Note that overriding phongexponent will also override the info derived from the
phong exponent texture, which is a common texture for more complex models/materials.

Liquor store, 2.11.2015. Foreverforum

Car, 16.9.2018. Boogermensch/Goobr

Valuable Override Commands

Other than the phong, there is a lot of other very valuable commands such as
$basetexture that lets you change the texture of the material.
Or $color that lets you change the color of the material.
$color command you might use to change the color of the grass, it’s a very common command
that a lot of scenebuilders use when making their scenes.
Beware that $color can only change the colors that exist, rather than add new ones. For
example, you cannot use $color to change a blue shirt to a red one.

And it’s very easy to set up, you choose the material you want, and you add a color attribute
that you name $color from there on it’s straightforward. You just chose the colour you want.
Alternatively, you can use vector3 to type the R G and B values, which also offers the advantage
of being able to make an object appear brighter.

As for the $basetexture you set that one up by choosing the string attribute.

Take in mind you have to copy paste the location of the texture.
This is where you find the texture, you copy paste the one you want to the $basetexture
command.

And one final thing we should mention is Lightprobes and envmaps.

Now that’s a science on it’s own, what it basically does are specular reflections, you will also
have to set some of it outside the source engine.
Up until now you were able to do reflections with phongboost, but if for example you want to
reflect the water and see for example reflection of the sky on the said water you need
lightprobes and envmap.
There is a great tutorial on the subject again done by our dear community member XieAngel,
that you can check out over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfmWwVhAHLU&t=834s

And that all together leads us to the end of the Override Materials.
Very useful option when it comes to the scenebuilding, that’s gonna do you wonders if you
manage it well.

And now, we move onto the rendering.

Rendering

Rendering options

So you’ve scenebuilt your scene, you lit it up and it’s all ready for the final part, and that’s
rendering.

SFM has a couple of different rendering options, and by now you used at least one, and if you
only worked on posters up until now, that one was probably exporting a poster.
Which if you’re only making a picture makes sense, right ?

Well no, not really.

When rendering as a poster you might encounter at least a couple of different problems, stuff
like overlay’s and particles might be broken.
So your safest bet is to go with rendering as a movie. But before we do that, you want to open
your console and type in “mat_mipmaptexture 0” what that does is that it reduces antialiasing
at larger distances, as you can see from the example below.
Once you click on the Export Movie tab, you’re gonna see this.

First thing you’re gonna do is your gonna change export settings to Image Sequence

For the Format I recommend either TGA or PNG.

Resolution here is set as a default, I usually render as 4K.

“but that also can be a drawback since people can zoom in every detail on your scene, and
some of your scenebuilding errors are gonna be clearly visible, therefore that’s gonna require
you to either fix them in sfm or later in post.”

Now since you’re rendering a poster, you only need 1 frame.

So for Duration you’re gonna go Custom and you’re gonna set it on 1 frame.
Now you click on Export Movie, and you wait.
It might take a while depending on how big your scene is, the important thing is to be patient
and not touch your pc while the scene is rendering.

Now i’ve mentioned 4K up there, and you yourself can’t find it under the Resolution tab, the
reason for that is because you didn’t activate your launch commands

Nightcall, 4.10.2020, Nurserk.

Galactus, 29.7.2020, Rammkap.

Launch Commands

Launch commands are a set of commands that are gonna enable you to render your sfm picture
in a higher resolution, both picture wise, and shadow wise.

In order to enable them you’re gonna right click your sfm in steam and go under properties
where you can find the launch commands option.
There you can copy paste these commands:

-sfm_shadowmapres 8192
-sfm_resolution 2160
+mat_antialias 8
+mat_forceaniso 16
-reflectiontexturesize 4096

Take in mind that while you’re working on your scene, you don’t want these enabled as those
slow down sfm by a lot.
What you can do is, you can make a shortcut to your sfm, by pinning sfm to your taskboard.
launch commands only go in action, if you launch sfm through your steam.
So you only want to launch it from your steam when you’re ready to render.

Rendering takes us to a final part of this guide, and that’s post editing.

Tiger’s Paw District, 6.12.2020. Atlas/RedLine2311

Across The Universe, 1.8.2020. Mr.Filmz

Post Production

Introduction

Now this part really is optional, lots of people don’t do it and still make great stuff.
However there is no doubt that if you use tools like photoshop that your work is gonna become
more sophisticated, therefore better.
Now we use post for all sorts of stuff, you might want to fix clipping by using a clone stamp tool
or you want to add some more atmosphere to your picture by using all sorts of brushes.
So we’re gonna start with brushes, and for the sake of this tutorial we’re gonna use photoshop
as our main platform to do post production.

But before we jump in here is a very quick example of what post production does to your render.
“Post production breakdown of the Atomic Age scenebuild”

Bloom

Once you have your picture rendered and you've dropped it in the photoshop, it's time we finally
do that bloom.

I will be guiding you step by step.

You will first copy paste your render layer twice, so that you have three layers all together in the
layer tab.
Then you will set the blending mode on color dodge on the top layer, after that you will merge
the top and the second layers.
After you've merged the layers, you will go on the filter, blur, gaussian blur, set it around
25.00.

And then finally you will set the blending mode of the bloom layer on the screen, after that all
that's left is to play with the intensity slider, and set your bloom according to the scene.

This way, you have complete control over your bloom, and with an eraser tool, you can delete it
easily from unwanted parts of the image.
“Heat, 03.10.2021, Atlas/RedLine.”

Brushes

If you’re using photoshop, you can find all sorts of cool brushes around the internet.
The ones you will be seeing in this tutorial you can get here:
https://evenant.com/concept-art-brush-pack/
So brushes you can use as another atmospheric pass, be it dirt rising from the ground, or
clouds far in the distance, or as in the example below you can use it as a mist slowly rising from
the ground.

“Example of how to add mist to your scene”

So in order to add a good mist effect to your scene, you’re gonna choose a “cloud” brush and
you’re gonna make a new layer, there you're gonna set the intensity to what you believe is good.
After that you’re gonna grab the color of your ground, or general color of the scene and you will
slowly start adding mist to your scene.

“Tip: adding multiple layers and changing intensity is also very useful, somewhere the mist
might be more intense”

So that up there is one example of how you can use brushes.

But you can really use them however you want, mixing them with volumetric lights, it’s for sure
gonna help you out with adding a depth to your scene.
Another thing you’re gonna use them for is any sort of light source.
Here is an example of that.
“Example of shine/bloom”

So for the above example we used the standard brush, we took the colors from the light source,
made a new layer, and then we drew the shine on top of the vending machine.
After that we lowered the opacity, and that’s it.

You can do the same trick on any sort of a light source you might have on the screen.

Now let’s say you have an object clipping in the scene, or there is something you want removed.
Rather than resending the scene, if the object is small enough and is easy to work with, you can
just use the clone stamp tool.
“Clone stamp tool in action”

So for the above example I used a clone stamp tool to remove some dirt that I thought was
reaching too far, to do that, I selected the main picture.
I copied the piece of the road with the stamp tool and I placed it multiple times over the dirt.

We only really went through this briefly, you can use brushes for all sorts of stuff.
And in the end, just like with the scenebuilding or lighting it’s up to you to be creative with the
tools you have.
The White Sun Rises, 27.4.2020, ComradIvan.
Curfew, 19.4.2020, Osthanes.
Color, Contrast, and Final Words

Color and contrast is also a very important part of the post, and in order to do it you will work
with adjustments such as curves, brightness and contrast, and hue and saturation.

Most of it is self explanatory and I won’t go into the detail of how to use each setting, as each
scene you do will require you to do your post adjustments in a different way.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to understand color, and how to properly set it both in
sfm and later color correct it in the post.
Remember not to overkill it, and feel free to experiment in order to make something new and
unique.
Post processing is really going to make your photos stand out. Understanding how to use all the
utilities powerful softwares such as photoshop have is going to make your work stand out even
more for sure. And if you decide to give it a go, I can’t stress enough how important the things I
said about the post above are.

This all together brings us to the end of this guide.

I hope you found out some new stuff that will help you improve and make better pictures.
Remember that it’s all in the practice, and trial and error.
Share your stuff with the community and embrace the critique you get along the way.
And don’t forget to have some fun in the end!
Credits
I would like to thank everyone who helped me get this guide written and shared with the rest of
our small but vibrant community.
I hope you found it helpful and inspirational, and never forget that you’re only working with 1
frame, make sure it counts!

-Atlas

WRITTEN BY:

Atlas/RedLine2311
Mars-5200
Anonymousgamer
XieAngel

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

NeoPretzel
Scamarai
SunKenR
Madirate

You can find most of us on the sfm’s discord server.