An astronaut stumbling across a massive, hand-cradled crimson flower inside an ancient flooded ruin.
For this piece, I leaned away from photorealism and went for a stylized, painterly illustration look, using blown-out highlights, heavy contrast, and crunched color values to tie the warm firelight and cool night sky together.
Compositor Pipeline (No Paint-Over):Instead of doing a heavy paint-over in Photoshop, I built the painterly look directly inside Blender’s Compositor:
Kuwahara Filter: Smooths raw render noise into broad, brushwork-like strokes.
Diamond Sharpening & Sobel Filter: Brings back crisp structural edges and adds subtle hand-inked outlines so the architecture doesn’t get muddy.
Painting Filter & Color Crunching: Layers surface texture over the render and unifies the warm/cool palette.
The project also contained many procedural geometry nodes setups, the most remarkable are:
Procedural Edge Erosion: Isolates sharp edges by angle, converts them into displaced tubes via noise textures, turns them into a volume-to-mesh cutter, and booleans them out of the stone architecture for natural, non-destructive wear and tear.
Slope-Based Rock Scatter: Uses a Normal Dot Product mask against the Z-axis so rocks only scatter naturally on flatter surfaces with randomized Z-rotation and scale.
