An autumn stroll along a canal towpath


Main render

AO Pass (closest I could get to a clay render)

Shadow Pass - which I think looks quite cool on its own.

A different crop, focussing on the happy couples (a bit twee, I know :grin:)

Original render with no compositing.

Painterly/sketchy processing version (just messin’ about now)

Quick and dirty low resolution and samples render of a different view (some potential here for scene number 2!)


Thumbnail


Sorry - couldn’t resist adding another (still low samples, so quite noisy), but an uncropped ‘version 2’ depicting ‘the golden hour’ (possibly/hopefully)!

During lockdown my partner and I have spent many hours strolling along our local canal towpath. This is a homage to said towpath! I never thought my PC would be able to cope with so much foliage, but with cycles-x, geometry nodes and rendering at low-res it manages it easily.

So many assets - including graswald, botaniq, maxtree (some fantastic free resources), free people and animals from CGTrader and Sketchfab… some bought assets from quixel, CGTrader (swan and walls), some models from Moonik Office (blendermarket) - really good quality and excellent value. Also made a lot of use of Erindale’s geometry nodes toolkit. Life saver! Modelled some bits myself.

Really enjoyed this one and I quite like it, but any advice to make it (even :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:) better always appreciated (please be kind, I’m just doing this for fun). I know there are things to improve, but I’m in the realm of diminishing returns now, so am leaving it (until tomorrow when no doubt I’ll upload loads of different tweaked versions!!).

54 Likes

I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

2 Likes

Thanks Bart! Happy Christmas!

1 Like

What a beautiful scene!
I absolutely love this one, it looks just like a painting.
Congrats :+1:

1 Like

Thank you, that is very kind :slight_smile:

You’re on the #featured row! :+1:

1 Like

Incredible!. The only thing that kinda catches my (ever-scrutinizing) eye is the lack of transmission and SSS on their jackets. Otherwise, perfect! Bravo Lazlo!

1 Like

Thanks - much appreciated! I may have to go back in and have a tinker! :smiley:

1 Like

Lovely work!

1 Like

Really love this - great work. One thing I’m curious about - are the trees mostly Botaniq? I think I see an issue that I also experience to do with the relatively low density of leaves on Botaniq assets resulting in sparsity when looking through the branches at the sky. I’ve managed to resolve this a little by playing with the AlphaOver node (essentially having the leaves block out all of the sky and not really let them do any alpha blending).

Thank you, very much appreciated (especially coming from you!). Many thanks :slight_smile:

Thanks - much appreciated! In fact, there aren’t that many botaniq trees in this one as far as I can recall (I think I started with a lot, then gradually replaced them with other assets which look a bit better close up - particularly the free maxtree trees - excellent) and I’ve deliberately removed some leaves from some trees to make it a bit more autumnal.