Pillarcliff Inn
Nestled high in the mountains is a tranquil, beautiful, inn perched on a jutting tower of rock. A premier destination- unless you’re afraid of heights, as the only way to get there is a steep cliffside trail, leading to a open-air elevator ride, with your final destination having no fences or guardrails. Careful where you step
Details
Timeline
I first started working on this project two years ago, hit a wall, and forgot about it until a week ago. Luckily, my skills have improved to the point where I was able to finish this now.
Inspiration
My inspiration for this scene was Raphaelle Deslandes’ “Cute cottage on a cliff in the woods and the only access to it is an elevator pulley mechanism”. I have a physical print of this on my wall, actually, and I see it every day when I’m working in Blender.
I use “inspiration” rather than reference, as I’ve deviated and gone my own way rather significantly, but it’s undeniably inspired by and dedicated to Raph. She’ll probably never see this, but if she does- you’re incredible, thanks for inspiring me!
Scene setup
This scene is a mixture of 2D planes and 3D objects. It only works from one specific camera angle, as a result, as I worked to camera view from start to finish.
This scene required five view layers to get the highly complex depths right- some birds are in front of the building, some are behind, etc.
Clouds
As is usual for me, the clouds are overlapping 2D planes at various depths, animated to create a parallax effect.
Compositing
Fair warning- my compositing nodes are a complete mess, I didn’t care to clean them up.
Normally I would share a comparison of pre/post compositing- however, there’s essentially nothing to see in a single image pre-compositing due to the extensive work being done by the compositor.
Technical details
I built and rendered this scene in- initially- 3.6.5 Goo Engine and later in 4.1 Goo Engine. This topic is not the place to share my thoughts about 4.2; suffice it to say I’ll be using 4.1 for the foreseeable future.
Painting was done in Procreate and Affinity Photo- some painting I did on a 2022 iPad Air, some I did on my XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro.
Textures
All the textures on the building are procedurally done in Blender. Here ae some notable examples:
An early texture test from 2022:
As you can see, I have significantly improved… everything since then
Paintings
These are the main three paintings.
Mountains
The mountains are planes I cut into shape and added procedural texturing to:
Building
Birds
I created, rigged, animated, and painted a single low-poly bird and used boid particles to make the flock. Geometry nodes aren’t quite up to task for boids, and my own bespoke Python solution isn’t ready for use yet.
An important detail from the inspirational work is that the birds are white in front of the blue mountain and blue everywhere else. I love this effect, and made it a priority to add it:
I’m using what should probably be called “hacky compositing” to do this, doing some simple math with cryptomatte picks and image alphas.
I rendered out the birds separately as image planes and imported those.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to @thorn for being a second pair of eyes and helping me get this looking good.
Thanks for looking 
seems like the major takeaway here is “huh, that looks like a death trap”. But at least the view is great!
