Hi guys! This scene is my attempt to visualize the River Tethys as described in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos novels. I created it while imagining how such a moment might look in a film adaptation of the novels. The entire sequence was modeled, textured, and rendered in Blender, and color-graded in DaVinci Resolve - all without the use of any AI tools. I plan to continue visualizing more scenes from Hyperion in the future.
Animatic breakdown:
Animatic itself:
Very Nice Work and Welcome!!!
Thanks man! 
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
Ouuuyeeaah! Thank you Bart! It’s a honor for me to be there among other cool guys and their works! 
Fantastic, wonderful! The idea of recreating the Hyperion Cantos novel is also beautiful.
Wow! What kind of wizardry is that? 
very nice!
I really like the idea and how you did it.
Nice!!!
Absolutely gorgeous! Truly stunning. 
Did you use the new portals feature?
This is beyond cool! Really interesting visual!
Thanks man! Glad you like it!
Thank you Hank! There are no wizardry, lol, only hours and hours of tweaking and re renders! 
Hours definitely well spent!
Thank you!
Thanks man! Yes, the lighting inside and outside the portal was the most challenging part of building the scene. I tried a new feature, but unfortunately, I didn’t achieve the desired result. The main lighting scheme I used is based on two separate HDRIs, separated by a light path node (transparent depth). The portal itself includes a separate layer with a transparent node in the material. As a result, everything in front of and around this surface is illuminated by one HDRI (the dark sunset), and everything in the scene behind this layer is illuminated by the second HDRI (the sun on the left). And even this setup didn’t produce the result I needed, although it works correctly. However, the objects behind the portal looked a little dull, as if they weren’t receiving enough light. This was partially solved by increasing the number of transparency samples in the render settings. However, I still had to set up the scene through compositing and render the two lighting conditions separately.
