Rendering

When it came to rendering I made sure that the quality was set to production. This made it take longer to render but I think the results were worth it. I only rendered out a master layer and an occlusion pass as I already set up my lights, I didn't think the shadows would need much more adjustment when it came to post production. Below you can see the different passes and the outcome of when combined. The occlusion pass creates self shadowing which produces a more realistic effect, adding more depth to the shot. To create an occlusion pass, you need to select all the objects in your scene and create a new render layer, then under the attributes you can create an occlusion preset. The preset itself will always need adjusting depending on your shot. The more samples you have, the less grainy the pass will be, however this will also increase render time. I pushed mine from 16 to 128 as I wanted the best possible outcome. I'm quite happy with how it's turned out so far, from here I will be compositing the shots in After Effects and possibly colour grading them.

I noticed that with the renders, the ground texture was somewhat lost in some shots. When up close to the camera, the normal map was not visible. I'm not sure if this was because of the physical sun and sky causing this or if the ground plane was too close to the camera, or if depth of field was affecting it in some way. I didn't adjust any of the original settings so this is something I may come back to and look at in more depth to see if I can figure out the cause of this.

Occlusion Pass

Master Layer

Master and Occlusion Pass