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Cycles Render, Blender 3.4
It's a cool render.
I tried to create the feeling of something tiny and a little bit magical in this render.
And it worked wonderfully.
Combining low-poly with realistic techniques like subsurface scattering always works wonders.
(The render does have some issues, too: it could use some more details in the background, and it's a little overexposed in the highlights. But whatever.)
Subsurface Scattering (SSS) is a rendering technique that simulates light entering an object, bouncing around a bit and out again.
For example, when you put your hand over a bright flashlight—the reddish, almost see-through way the light passes through your skin and flesh is SSS.
You can see this effect on marble, milk, potatoes—even the occasional low-poly mushroom.
The main reason this render feels miniature is the shallow depth of field.
Depth Of Field (DOF for short) is the range of focus when you take a picture or render an image. If an image is taken using a shallow depth of field, it means that not much of the image is in focus.
An image with a greater depth of field will have both near and far objects (and stuff in between) in focus.
When you use a very shallow depth of field, with objects in the foreground and the background out of focus, the viewer gets the impression of a tiny subject—the 'miniature' effect.
That's what's happening in this render. Both the foreground and the background are out of focus, and we get a sense of a pretty small mushroom. (I won't lie, it helps that mushrooms are already tiny.)
So how do you set up depth of field in Blender?
First, select your Camera object.
Then open the green Camera tab in the Properties panel.
Scroll down until you see the Depth Of Field section and check the box to turn it on. There's 2 Depth Of Field settings that matter most: the Focus Object and the F-Stop.
The F-Stop controls how blurry things get. It's simple: the lower the number, the blurrier. In this render I had the F-Stop set at 0.7.
The Focus Object controls what's in focus. I always add a new Empty to the scene, rename it 'focus,' and set this as the Focus Object. Wherever this empty is located will be sharply in focus.
For this render, I placed the empty up against the stem of the mushroom—that's what I wanted in focus. But you can easily place the focus anywhere.
Here's what it would look like with the foreground mushrooms in focus instead. The focus Empty is selected so you can see where it is.
Screenshot: Blender 3.4
This looks even more miniature (because the subject objects are much smaller.)
I almost like it better than the original!
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