In this personal project, my goal was to create a forest scene with a wooden pathway, just after raining. The key to this was playing with variable highlights.
Since Vue's modeling options are pretty limited, I had to go with a very simple geometry (basically a bunch of stretched cube primitives), and add as many details as possible to the texture, bump maps and highlights. I generated the texture in Filter Forge, and exported it along with its bump map. I added some extra details to the bump in Vue based on a fractal, then I added highlights in Vue. Fractal-based (procedural) variable highlights added to the realism and created a nice, wet-looking wooden path.
The final result - after postwork in Photoshop, Filter Forge & After Effects (Optical Flares)
