I was heavily inspired last week by Mohamed_Chahin’s work I saw here on blenderartist.org: Northern Lights in a Jar Decided to make something similar to help push my skill level further as I too had never done anything close to photo-realistic before.
I learned Blender back in 2012, but at the time work got in the way and I only Blended on rare occasions for small simple projects. In the past month I’ve LOVED Blending in 2.8, and I’m now better than I’ve ever been at Blending. Still no expert though…as I have soooo much to learn! The new UI in 2.8 has really made picking the program back up easier overall. Shortcuts are forgotten so easily if you spend any time away from the program.
I had a lot of fun working on this project and I may do more “environments in a bottle” scenes because I really enjoyed this one. Thinking about a snow scene at night!
Edit: Shoutout to Sheepit! Blender render farm who helped render the final image of this project. Please join them!