I haven’t managed to make any progress on actually finishing this project since my last post, but I have had a bit of time to play with ambient occlusion and z-depth mapping. So… same render as before, but now with depth of field and some ambient occlusion:

…and the z-depth map:

…and the ambient occlusion map. I did the leaves on the trees by transparency mapping the planes where the leaves went on the model, but because of that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to ambient occlude the trees. So I removed them for the ambient occlusion map:

I actually found an alternate way to render out the z-depth map, but I’m not entirely sure this is as physically accurate as the standard way Maya does z-depth:

Hopefully more soon!