So I saw a question on blender.stackexchange about how to make a pond shader, and one procedural shader test led to another thing until I somehow ended up making this.
Bonus points if you spotted the toad.
Man - beautiful! Of course, the closer you get to reality … the more you have to push it. If I’d seen this in passing, I’d have thought it was a photograph … but the grass looks just a little off - maybe too uniform on the color or specular … but overall, fantastic detail!
And sadly … I did not see the toad …
Thanks so much, dude!
Good point about the grass too; it could definitely use some improvement. I’ll probably make my own grass next project instead of using the first thing I find on blendswap. 
This looks awesome! May I ask about your texturing workflow? Do the bigger rocks and the ground belong to the same mesh or are they seperate objects? And did you use any external tools for example substance painter?
Thanks, man!
Were it not for the toad, there would only be 3 materials and 3 meshes in the whole scene. The most complex one is the ground texture since there are changes in albedo, roughness, and specularity near and under the water’s surface. Other than those procedural aspects, it’s just three maps (albedo, roughness, and displacement) from Texture Haven.
No external tools were used.
100% Blender powered! 
Cool thanks for the information!
I am pondering with the idea of the Toad being very closely centred within this frame 
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
Thanks Bart! You have a great weekend too!
Epic!! Thanks and God bless, Bart!
where’s the toad ?
He’s in there… 
Cool pic. Yes I spotted the Toad. 
I have to confess that i’m really upset when i see deeply photorealistic scenes !
Mostly those cooked in 3,3 minutes
Thanks for this beauty ! and congratz !
Happy blending !
Yeah this probably would have taken 12+ hours before the AI denoiser and my new GPU lol. Blender has had some insane improvements to rendering in just the last 1 or 2 years.
Thanks and God bless!
Very nice, I’m not sure my computer would be able to render stuff that fast lol, I have a 1050 ti with 4 i5 6400, so I just use Eevee all the time lol, I found the frog but I think I also spotted a mouse as well lol.
I read that you would only have 3 meshes if it wasn’t for the frog which would mean that the appearance of a mouse was unintentional, the fact that the stick and the stone looks like a mouse to me is like a lesson that if you manipulate your environment right, you never know what you can create.
Wow, it really does look like there’s a mouse!
Hey, that’s better than what I used for about 3 years.
Everything in my portfolio on this forum except for this and “Centenario Burnout” was done with a laptop that was about 4% the performance of my current PC and only had 8GB of RAM.
But I must say, having a faster PC definitely helps. 
Wow! It looks very realistic, maybe the grass is the only thing that could be improved in my opinion, apart of that really good job, congratulations!
So kool ! Well done!!
Did you use adaptive subsurface to the displacememt of the ground or just regular subdivision ?
Cheers
