In my usual ‘style’, this is a Blender and Photoshop collection of images, processed to differing degrees of ‘painterly-ness’ of a small farmstead in the Great Langdale area of the Lake District in England (plus the fell above it in one image). Bit repetitive, but hey ho. I can never decide which style I like the most (usually, the most painterly, at least for a while).
Data for the topography is from the Environment Agency (1metre) - processed in QGIS and Gaea. Fiddled with in Blender, using assets from botaniq, maxtree, quixel, graswald and others. Buildings, fences, sheep, bluebells all by me.
Always appreciate comments on how to improve. While I quite like this in principle, I think the whole series lacks a bit of oomph.
There are a lot of leading lines that point to a place that does not have any particular interest. Meanwhile the detailed foreground (buildings) and maybe the stream a bit higher up tend to draw the eye away from this, so the image lacks some unity.
Not a lot in Gaea on this one really. The height data from the Environment Agency is so high res that all I’m really doing is a bit of ‘healing’ to soften some of the more ragged areas and, yes, a bit of gentle erosion to emphasis some details. On this I think I also tried to slightly flatten out the bottom of the mountain to make the area around the farm a bit less undulating (as it’s based on a real place I didn’t do too much so it didn’t deviate too much from ‘reality’). I also generate a lot of maps in Gaea to help with texturing later (flow maps, slope maps etc). Helps get some variety in colours and so on.
Thanks again!
I would love to know more about the process of getting exact topographical height data and importing it into Blender. Is this height data publicly available somewhere? And what’s the best way you’ve found to get it into Blender?
There are some addons - particularly BlenderGIS - that will being height data in and turn into a displaced mesh (uses displacement modifier IRC). However, I don’t tend to use those. I get the height data from the English Environment Agency (https://environment.data.gov.uk/DefraDataDownload/?Mode=survey) (Scottish and Weslh data is also available from their respective Gov websites). I then take the data into QGIS (free GIS software) to clip it and export as 16bit. I could probably bring that into Blender as a height/displacement map and use either microdisplacement or the modifier, but instead I take into Gaea to process. This usually means some healing, erosion etc just to smooth out the bumps and highlight the erosion. I also create a lot of my masks and maps in there too. I then export as a mesh and bring into Blender as normal (obj file). However, I also output a displacement map so I could still use the modifier if need be - just that Gaea probably does a better job.
Hope that helps a bit… let me know if I can clarify?
I think the mountains are made out of the same type of rock, plus the green slopes. I am sure it looks like where it is supposed to look like though. When I think of England I tend to picture Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and maybe the white cliffs of Dover, so don’t take it wrong.
I really like this scene. It’s great to see a landscape so grounded in reality and the style exploration is interesting to see. One thing I might suggest would be to consider developing the lighting and atmospherics a little more. At the moment there’s something of a disconnect with the flat grey sky and the bright sunlight on the CG, so perhaps either leaning into the British greys and removing the BG contrasts in fog; or going for a sunny sky with a few clouds to cast compositional shadows on the landscape would unify the image and allow you to clarify the points of focus. This reference is an example of a possible direction, where the BG is so soft in contrast that the white of the building has a lot of oomph despite the image’s overall subtlety. But there’re a lot of options to go with. Great render. Do you have an ArtStation or other portfolio?
Thanks - appreciate the advice. I do struggle with lighting and atmosphere. This started off as a quite bright spring day with a nice blue sky, but when adding some volumetrics and the add a bit of haze from the mist pass, I lose that sky and it goes grey and flat. I want the regression in the landscape as you get in reality but it ruins the sky. Not sure what to do to fix that but will keep persevering!! Thanks again!!
Dax Pandhi, the creator of Gaea (I think) used to work a lot with Eon Vue and I have a book of his called Realism in Vue. For landscapes he emphasized the importance of scale, ie if a landscape is say 10km wide and deep you should set it up like that in the 3D app, not at scaled down size. I tried this with a recent work in Blender - it’s a pain because you have to change the far clipping distance in all viewport cameras as well as the render camera, but I think the sense of depth and space was better than I have achieved before. Of course if you’ve imported a mesh from Gaea it might already be at real world scale, but if not perhaps give it a try.
