I’m working on a 5km x 5km terrain representing a river valley. My aim is to block in some features with low poly assets and then work up different areas to look for some good ‘shots’ - I spent many years doing landscape photography so this is a similar approach but virtual. So here is the general scenario so far
And something more of an ‘establishing shot’.
I expect to be working on this same project for a while, hence the new WIP thread.
For the river I extended a cube in x and y for the terrain, with a few subdivisions. Then created a wavy line of verts, skinned it with the skin modifier, applied it and used it as Boolean Difference on the terrain to cut out the river shape. It’s all pretty low poly at the moment.
I’m using a splat map for the terrain that allows me to distribute up to 8 different shaders across the terrain, although at the moment I have only one green diffuse and a brown diffuse for the road.
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Starting to detail out the background mountains. These are from Gaea - not totally happy with them but I’m on my way to building up a collection of mountains to use in various images. I’m using displacement modifiers here. Having adaptive subdivision only work in rendered view is a bit of a limitation, especially as the scene gets heavier. If necessary I can just render the mountains separately and comp them in if the scene gets too heavy.
The clash of styles is a bit jarring, but you know, WIP.
And here’s some nice evening light.
Getting more real (sort of). Matte painters say that the sky is the key to a landscape. I used to try to get what I wanted with volumetric clouds but using images is so much more flexible and varied. Also in this last image I used a longer lens (44mm instead of 35mm as previously). It’s made the scene a little less expansive but highlighted the village a bit more.
OK, so here’s where I got today. This one uses volumetric clouds just for a change.
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Now that I have a general layout I’m looking for good ‘shots’. I think I’ll start with this:
Current assets are indicative only. I’ll do this in a separate file as there’s no need to include all the content that won’t appear in this image.
Later:
Preliminary work on the mill. Texture just a projected photo (the one I used to model it, with help from fspy).
And now I’ve added some more vegetation and a few rocks.
And here’s a more ‘intimate’ view of the mill.
Actually I’m quite liking this shot. I think I’ll work this one up to a more finished state.
Update - have started more detailed modelling and texturing on the mill building instead of just the projected texture I’ve been using so far. Also trying some different lighting. Have been using Nishita for most of these shots but using an HDRI for this one. Also I think the less cinematic format suits the theme better.
And a bit more work
And here’s the final result.
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