Dominic Davison

URL: digital-dom.deviantart.com
Email: king_dom1@hotmail.com

Dominic Davison, from the UK, has been a freelance digital artist for around five years. He primarily creates natural landscapes with Vue, and tries to re-create some of the classic landscape paintings of the 16th, 17th and 18th century. His work has been used in magazine articles, on book covers and in video games. He has always had an interest in art from an early age and has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember. When he saw early examples of what Vue could achieve, in terms of photo realistic environments, he knew that's what he wanted to create. With Vue the only limitation is your own imagination
He will usually take a reference from a photograph or painting. In his case it will be a landscape scene or a classic painting, and he will try and re-create a version of that within Vue. This will include planning weather and atmosphere conditions that he intends to use. For example if it is a jungle scene he will use a hazy atmosphere and volumetric lighting with special gels, which give the appearence of beams of light coming through trees. He will then create the time of day, position of the sun and camera perspective. Sometimes changing the amount of ambient and sunlight levels can really make the difference in terms of realism. The aspect ratio of the scene is also important. He generally goes for a panoramic setting, as it allows more to be seen in a scene. It will usually take two or three days to create a scene.
He is a big fan of artists such as Constable, Barend Cornelius Koekkoek, and Daniel Ridgway Knight. A lot of his landscape art has been influenced by their work. He really loves the way Vue is able to create realistic environments like these in a short amount of time.
He will usually do some postwork in either Painter or Photoshop, to give the Vue scene a painterly effect. Although he likes the way Vue creates photo realism, he is after a cross between realism and painting. He is currently building an online gallery of his work selling prints of different sizes.

Woodland Waterway, Chapter 5:

For this scene I wanted to create a photorealistic render. This was achieved primarily by using the atmosphere settings, which are vital in this respect. I used the radiosity setting with indirect skylighting. The main tree on the left was created myself using the Botanica plant editor. The foreground terrain is a plant ecosystem and shaped to form a river bank. The rest of the trees are standard Vue trees, and the bridge is a model from Cornucopia3d.com. There was a small amount of post processing in Photoshop with regards to levels and curves.

Autumnal Walk, Chapter 7:

This scene was created using a spectral atmosphere with lighting set at global ambience. A small amount of mist was used to create the feel of an early morning. There was a fair amount of terrain editing, especially the small bank on the left of the image. The trees are mostly large European Ash tree models, which are ideal for editing, but have a very high polygon count so are used sparingly. The leaves on the ground are actually a leaf texture mixed with the ground terrain. All post processing was done within Vue, and included changing the overall hue and exposure settings.