More practice with displacements, texturing, lighting, and compositing.
I used Blender’s compositor to give it a more painterly feel.
Here’s the raw render:
I used Blender’s compositor to give it a more painterly feel.
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Love this! What’s the basic modeling workflow? All blender?
I sincerely hope that one day we have erosion in Blender! Until then, we have to rely on other software to generate landscapes with flows and deposits like this. Alternatively, grab DEMs or LiDAR of real terrain on the earth.
Here, I used Gaea to generate the heightmap. It is capable of producing many data maps to aid in texturing, but for this piece I just used the standard outputs of the erosion node : height, wear, flow, and deposit. These are all grayscale images which I used in the shader editor to help texture the plane.
There are thin clouds above the mountain, which I put there to add fill light to the shadows. They were made invisible to the camera so they didn’t obstruct the view. The sky is Nishita, with a much larger than realistic sun size to soften the shadows.
Compositing was done all in Blender. I abused the denoise node to get the soft look.
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wow! do you think that you could make a basic tutorial/step by step for doing something like this? it’s really cool and I have no idea where I would even begin to make something like this in blender 
Nice. Gaea is great! I also like the denoise for paint effect. Really great work.
Hi Nik,
There are many youtube tutorials on terrains from heightmaps, so that would probably be the best place to start. You can also generate the height information on the fly with noise textures in the shader editor. Here’s a quick introduction : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAs395KaBU. There are so many tutorials that go into a lot more detail; many of them are older, so keep in mind that things may have changed a little as Blender has improved.
The basic premise is to apply an adaptive subdivision modifier to a plane, and feed the displacement with height information to form the terrain.
Once you have gotten comfortable, create a new topic in “works in progress” category and ask specific questions there (mention me in a comment so I get notification).
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Thank you so much! I will try to figure this out, as environments are a super cool feature in beldner that I know nothing about