What a lovely morning!

Hi there,

let me show you my recent work. Its a lowpoly kindish illustration of a lovely morning. Render done in Blender, base done with the help from QGis and Openstreetmap. Heavy use of particle system for the trees.

I hope you like it, let me hear what you think.

Best regards



1 Like

This is beautiful, the colors are absolutely perfect. Great work!

great work
it has a good feeling to it

how do you do your lighting? It is amazing.

Wow, that’s some awesome work! I agree, the lighting is great. Is the mist done with the mist pass or is it volumetrics?

:yes::yes::yes:
Wow!!! Your pictures are beautiful! I really like them! Keep it up!

Hey there,

lighting was done using a HDRI. There are no additional lights in the scene. If you haven’t heard of “filmic color management”, go check it out. I also did some adjustments in post, but tried no to go overboard with it.

Mist was done using the mist pass in compositor. It’s a pretty basic process. Check mist pass in render layers, adjust the start and depth values in world settings and finally use a color-ramp to squeeze the best of this pass in the compositor. I love using mist in large scenes, it really enhance the final image.

I will be sharing some of the process, how the model was done later. So, just for now some gif action:

https://media.giphy.com/media/jTCT7dzFonuUg/giphy.gif

Looks great! Killer lighting.

Hi there,

thanks for all the positive feedback!

I promised to speak about how the scene was done. Let my try.

First of all i got a good knowledge of CAD, Illustrator and GIS. This helped me a lot during this project. As i already said in the WIP thread, i used a product of the Swiss federal office of topology. The product i used was swissBUILDINGS3D 2.0. It’s a vector based dataset which describes buildings as 3D-models with roof geometries and roof overhangs. The high level of detail in all three dimensions, high coverage and the realistic rendering of the building volume bodies make this product a valuable basic dataset. Because they keep the data up to date, its a paid product. You can check it out here. I separated the roofs and walls via a normal selection, gave the roofs a material with random colors.

For the ground i got a height-map from Nasa’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). I could just used this height-map as it is, but i wanted to keep everything referenced and i the exact size. This is where QGis come into place. I imported the height-map. The data includes the CRS (Coordinate Reference System). Since i’m working in the Swiss CRS, it was pretty easy to reproject the data. I exported the model as an stl file, which had to be converted into a dae. For the material i needed some more information. Luckily i already got a referenced terrain i QGis. So i just needed to get some data from Opensteetmap (aviable as shp file). Boom, i had everything there. I exported maps for the forests, rivers, streets, parks and so on. These maps where used for creating the material and defining where the particle system should place my trees. The maps got quite large (6543px wide). Because everything was in the same CRS, i just used the “project from view (bounds)” for unwrapping.

So everything there, i had a very good base for the work in blender. With the help of the exported maps, i could put together the terrain material quite easy. Because data from Openstreetmap didn’t covered all the forests, i used a satellite image to place them. With the help of the snapping tool i could do this fairly fast.

I experimented a lot with the lighting. But as set up this morning HDRI and got the right angle i was set. (by the way, i used Pro Lighting Skies by Andrew Price). All that was left was to find the right camera angle, which i think was the hardest part. Because the client wanted to show the whole town/village at one render. I tested a lot of settings and focal lengths. In the end, i choose a very wide angle shot instead of zooming all the way out and loosing details.

Everything was set and i got some time left. So i created some details, like the cows in front (created one lowpoly cow, rigged and posed it) or the train in the station. The render will be printed on a large board, so i hope some will get the details. As last step i added the clouds and since the denoising feature is so cool, the volumetrics are no pain in the ass anymore.

Phew, a lot of technical stuff, but i hope you could follow along. So that’s it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Because there’s to much text in this post, i added some more pictures.

Best regards



I really love this low poly look.

I am so glad I found this. I just installed blender because I wanted to play around with low poly and something like this is my goal. It will be great for reference and inspiration.

Its is beautiful by the way.

This is a great render. Really beautiful style, seems anti-burton to me in a good way.

One thing though, very small, and I only say this because it seems like accuracy is your goal based on how you went about planning this town. Cows always graze north south. Your cows are facing all sorts of directions. Just FYI

That’s a myth, just FYI :stuck_out_tongue: Cows graze with their face away from the wind, which can come from any direction. On such a beautiful morning, there could be little to no wind and cows will graze in random directions.

Great results!!! Congrats!
I really like the mood, colors, environment!
Perfect piece of art!

Looked at the renders and was immediately… looks like home (Switzerland) :slight_smile:

Nicely done! Would love to have a version of my place too.

Delightful. I appreciate the details you share about how you accomplish this.

yyeah, impressive especially the geographic accuracy. I tried renders like that many years ago, the use of sun light and the atmosphere are very natural, its a nice vizualisation.

Thanks everybody for the overwhelming feedback and the top row!

I didn’t knew that about the grazing of cows. I’ll have that in mind for my next render.

Till next time!
Mauk

Looks like Switzerland, but better! I want to move right there.

Love those low poly cows.