Using Shaders For Graphical Improvements

hi . i find that the first step is getting your scene done in the 3d modeling app. once you are satisfied there , remember that shadows play a very big part of portraying depth. if you look at a dirt road, every single element on that ground is casting a shadow of some sort. even clouds of dust can cast shadows. so my first advise is to implement some kind of shadow system. realtime shadows are harder to achieve but give a pretty accurate result. so like ive learned from tutorials is to use 'baked' shadows or in other words save textures that have shadow details on them. all the 3d modellers have some form of technique to save shadow infomation to a jpg or dds file. thats pretty much the only difference between typical 3drad scenes and nice looking 3drad scenes. but thats just the first step. you can also look into screen effects like bloom or colour hues, but the one thing i find makes a huge difference are the shadows, the rest is linking you shadows direction to your lighting setup and various other light effects like bloom and godrays

but my one guiding point is to always get as close to your concepts as possible. whatever you can do in your modeller, try your best to do in 3drad . chances are good that you can get even 50% the quality of your concepts in 3drad . so the more you know about 3d in general the better your scenes will be. and shadmars shader are the best ive seen in 3drad . i look at post on the old forum archives and feel like "what happened?" those guys did stuff i wish i could do. like with the terrain shader i was asking about a couple of weeks earlier, i just saw so much potential in that. but even having said that , there is still massive potential here. it just takes time investment.