This project “Downstream” was inspired by artworks of Sweeper3D. I’ve been loving doing forest/nature renders lately. Trying to add micro details everywhere is such a fun process for me. I get lost track of time every time I do that. This has to be my most detailed project to date.
Getting the water shader set up was a bit tricky but in the end I used a few different techniques and I think it turned out to be pretty good. If you want a tutorial on that, let me know. I’m planning on doing a video about it soon as most of the people have been asking me for that. I even went an extra mile to add little fish under the water or add a toad and a turtle which ended up being not visible in the final render, sadly.
Did a minor post processing in Photoshop to finish up the piece. Here’s a before and after.
How did you make this?!??!
I’m starting blender and I really want to get into making environmental scenes. Any tips?
(Like how did you make the leaves, and water)
Welcome to BlenderGang xD! I think if you’re starting out you should follow a more beginner friendly tutorial rather than me haha.
But to answer your questions, I got a bit of help from addons like Vegetation, Botaniq and Scatter5 for nature assets and scattering vegetation.
One tip to give for someone who’s into creating believable forests is to layer as much as possible. One grass scatter layer won’t cut it. In nature, it’s never that simple. Sometimes I like to spend hours on microdetailing and it helps a lot overall even if the details were small.
This might be a stupid question, but when you make a scene like this, do you take the extra time to make the animal models yourself (the bird, rabbit, fish, toad, turtle, etc.) or do you get the models online? If you make them yourself, are there any tutorials you learned from that you can recommend? (I was a huge amphibian and reptile nerd when I was younger, hence my interest. XD)
Isn’t it wonderful to get lost within your creative imagination while designing, and clocks don’t exist !!
ps. However, when working commercially, with deadlines and time frames, one needs to be more pragmatic with our workflow, but it’s always good to make room for your passions to be expressed
Thank you! I actually don’t model much in my scenes. Especially animals are one of the hardest thing to do that’s why there’s a separate field to it in 3D.
There’s a great zoo pack by TrueBones VFX on Gumroad available for free to download. Loads of rigged animals with some preset animations. Only downside to the pack is that, close ups can be quite challenging as the quality of the animals are for mid to far renders.
I totally take different approach when working commercially. I add details depending on how much time I have and also how much I’m going to get for this project.
I keep seeing amazing organic environments on here, makes me want to try something similar myself.
