The main goal I set for myself was to create a volumetric environment with a distinct foreground, middle ground, and background. A separation like that creates a sense of depth and let you emphasize the things you want. Mainly, it was achieved with fog, lighting, and a Depth of Field effect to blur the background.

Post-Production

The fog creates an aerial perspective which morphs background into the fog and creates a background color. Blur helps to divide the scene into three layers (a foreground, middle ground, background). That task posed some difficulties: a standard Depth of Field effect didn’t give a proper result. It blurred semi-transparent objects (dust particles, electrical flashes, fire, etc.), so I had to create one more camera. A first camera (with blur shader in front of it) was filming a background. A second one was filming a foreground to keep it in focus. In the end, shots from both cameras were merged into a final image.