DIY 3D Background - Too Much Detail?

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bigwave

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Jan 23, 2008
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This sure turned out nice. I would love to see a finished picture with water and fish!
 

Jumko

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Jun 18, 2004
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Jersey
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Patrick
Finally got my camera back this weekend. Here's the finished product with the tank running for roughly a month and a half now. Stocking includes two gold marble angelfish, 3 female bettas (all sisters), and a trio of guppies. Plants are a mix of fake and real, with the real being anubias and hygro.

diybackground 002.JPG diybackground 009.JPG diybackground 011.JPG diybackground 012.JPG
 

StarSapphire22

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May 3, 2012
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Jessica
Absolutely wonderful! I love all your decorations that you added...the cluster on the bottom has a lot of texture and depth, and I love the anchor. The floating plants look really good too and all the colors really pop! Great job! Consider me officially jealous!
 

KI4WLG

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Jun 8, 2012
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North Carolina/South Carolina
Man that final product looks amazing!

Let me throw out my two cents here on making the depth pop a little more. I'm not sure what kind of paint you would use for this, but one of the methods I used when I did small scale modeling to make dimensions pop out more is a combination of blackwashing and drybrush highlighting. Blackwashing is simply brushing a heavily diluted dark color paint into the cracks and crevices of an object, wiping it off of the raised areas with a rag. After that has dried out, drybrush highlighting is taking a dry paintbrush and putting a small amount of light colored paint on it, then wiping nearly all of it off on a paper towel or piece of paper. Then very gently brushing the edges of the raised areas so that it just barely highlights the raised portions. Never done this on a large scale application, but it can make all the difference with small scale if you are looking to make something weathered and have the dimensions pop.
 

Neatfish

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May 1, 2012
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My Bat Cave somwhere in TX
Very nice. Can you pm how to do this. Thanks

[QUO:bowing:TE=Jumko;2798773]Thanks for the comments, guys! I'm pretty happy how it turned out.[/QUOTE]
 
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