(Pure, competing. The only thing I didn’t create is the icon from game-icons.net. Also a little bit of post processing in gimp.)
It’s not my best project, and it is a bit lacking in ways, but I like it overall. I experimented a lot with stylized shading this time, using it for the trees, grass, and ball. The ball is procedurally created in geometry nodes. The trees use gn as well, though they take a sculpted source shape. The grass is made with hair particles so I could customize the shading.
EDIT: Did some adjustments and used a shadow catcher so the ball properly casts shadows on the grass.
Pure, Cycles
2048 samples with OptiX denoising. (the fire really boosted my rendering times, adding it in post would probably be smarter )
If I am being brutally honest, I did not like the theme at first, seemed a bit too specific to me to provoke creative submissions. But I did not have time to participate for a long time, so I went all in on this one regardless, and had a great time And there are some awesome and clever entries too, so jokes on me for being narrow minded
It actually really was a simple flat plane through a panoramic camera they are a bit wonky to work with in Blender, but for a simple static shot with no complex compositing or anything I thought it easier than trying to convincingly bend the plane.
Finished, but the mapping on the geometry did not gives me a satisfying result. Found the “Directional Blur” in the compositor. Wished i could use the a map on the zoom input. But the result is good.
Maybe there is a hack to produce a input map to feed the vector blur. But i have no clue for this.
)
And there are some awesome and clever entries too, so jokes on me for being narrow minded 
