The scene was created in Blender 3.2. No 3d scans, no plugins, no third parties assets. Just plain old Blender. All materials are procedural. I only used two textures (from www.textures.com, 2k resolution) for some details.
The canyon rocks are fully procedural (microdisplacements). The node setup I came up with is quite versatile. By tweaking the various parameters, I was able to generate different variants of the same material for stones, boulders, small cliff and large canyon walls.
The scene was rendered in Cycles. The final compositing was done in Krita where I added the distance fog and made the usual adjustements on saturation and contrast.
And that’s it. No paint over and no photobashing.
PS. Since there are already plenty of great tutorials on this subject, I did not dive into the details. If you are interested on specific details/aspects of the workflow, feel free to drop me a line. I will be happy to share my (very) little knowledge with you.
Well, for very little knowledge this is a good result.
They are some little issues on the second look like the lack of a way to the entrance door and the absence of life or if in case of an abandon city traces of erosion or sand drifts.
But that does not detract from the good overall impression.
You are right. The pathway is actually one problem for which I haven’t found a fully satisfatory solution. Maybe you have some advice to spare.
My original plan was to blend the terrain material with a texture (the pathway) using vertex weights. Problem is the mesh is not refined enough. Thus, I am not able to assign the weights with enough accuracy in such a small area of my scene (and I cannot subdivide further as I already reached the max memory I can allocate on my GPU).
The second strategy was to add the path as a prop (like I did for the rocks). But in this case the pathway would not blend nicely with the surroundings.
I haven’t figured out any other solution, yet. If you have any trick to share, I will be happy to give it a try.
Ok, i see the problem.
The only way I could imagine, is to make it as a separate object.
You can put it to the surface with a shrinkwrap modifier, blends into transparency at the borders.
If necessary you could also make use of the dataTransfer modifier to equalize the normals of the outer faces of the object to the ground object.
