Hi everyone,
I’m using Blender to create the environment for a graphic novel. I’ll draw 2D characters on top of rendered 3D scenes (possibly using style transfer to stylize the 3D renders before drawing the chars).
The first series of scenes in set in a Chinese garden (大观园). I’m looking for feedback on how to make the environment look more lively and realistic.
Specs:
Ryzen 1700 and RX 480
Blender 2.79b with Cycles
-
How to I make the grass look more realistic? Right now it’s a simple Image texture as a plane, attached to the terrain plane via the particle system (I used this tutorial).
I’m afraid to use too much SSS or translucent shaders for performance sake.
Should I simply create additional grass objects (using another texture, possibly with slightly different color) and group them in an object group for the particle system? Right now it’s just using 1 – as a result there is no color variation. -
How do I make the cobblestone road look more realistic? In my second picture I’m maxed out the normals strength (it’s like 25), and the road still looks obviously different compared to the actual stones. Should I only use stones?
-
How do I make the scene perform better? I’m a Blender (and 3D modeling) newbie so I use a lot of prebuilt assets. The downside is that a lot of prebuilt assets have a lot of faces. The pagoda and tree in my scene combine for over 2M tris. Should I switch to a raster renderer (Blender Render, Eevee, maybe even Unreal). Currently scene takes 22 min to render on my CPU.
Any general advice is also appreciated!
All the best,
Jackson