That was the most fun i had creating a scene in a long time!
It started with a failed attempt as i didnt greeble properly, dumped that attempt and created a new scene with the usual copy and paste greeble workflow.
At some point i added water down there and somehow got the idea of placing some wooden piers there. A entire market followed.
A fun contrast between the crazy sci fi stuff happening above and then having the old school wooden structures down there.
The entire scene was done in the span of 5 days in my holidays, no external kitbash was used, about 80% of the assets were made from scratch for this scene.
A fanboy callback to the artwork “Worth enough” done by Radoxist.
Created with Blender 4.3
Rendered with Cycles (main vertical shot in 4k in 2 hours at 2000 samples on a rtx 3060)
Small FHD shots were rendered in time limit mode at 2 minutes each.
All heavily denoised with the open image denoiser in Blender.
Compositing done with Blender.
Minor curve adjustments and text added with Affinity Photo.
Thank you very much for the kind comments, i really appreciate it
@wrenlaurel The fun bit is, that i didnt even do a separate colour grade under water, its just the volume absorption shader which tints the incoming light in such a delightful way
@Oby1 Indeed, half life was such a beautiful piece of art and i really am fond of the art direction they took in hl2 and hl alyx.
I created a tutorial explaining how i created the depth in this secene with volumes.
The main take away is the usage of a height based volume which is dense at the bottom and gradually fading out to the top.
