Hello,
I’ve been trying for a while to get into stylized renders, so here’s my first render of the sort! Any thoughts and critiques are greatly appreciated.
The trees, grass, and the skydome were made with the help of some great tutorials I’ve found on youtube.
Rendered with Eevee in Blender 3.4.1
Everything looks good by itself, but your scene as a whole is quite cluttered visually. I think if you got rid of your clouds and zoomed in on the house and the deer, this would improve your render a lot.
Nice work 
I really love the hut, but the trees are getting in the way of the overall composition. They also don’t read that well yet, could be mistaken for clouds. If they were darker and less detailed it would help.
Also the hut is missing some contact shadows ( ambient occlusion ) on some of the horizontal wooden beams. You could try using HDRI rendering with cycles.
But you are on the right track, very nice stylization !
Yeah i was thinking that the trees are too much/dont fit into the scene. As for the ambient occluesion, i did have that turned on, but i have lights inside the hut, which are causing light leaks, since the walls have normals facing outwards. I thought i fixed it but what gives. I dont want to use cycles because i have a bunch of materials which only work with eevee, like the grass for example.
I see. Maybe setting the hut’s faces to double sided would help ? It’s not a huge deal.
I would keep the trees, they make sense behind the hut but need more work I guess.
Double sided? What would that mean, exactly? What I did here was that i just duplicated each wall, moved it slightly inwards and flipped the normals.
The trees I made following that vely popular tutorial for ghibli trees. He did mention that the trees dont work close up and also i didnt do one step which was xinda important probably.
The style of the trees also doesnt fit the rest of the scene i think, but i havent mich experience making trees by myself, especially not stylized ones. I would like to have trees that have more pronounced individual leaves, but i wouldnt want them to cast shadows on themselves, only on the surroundings
Blender renders faces double sided by default, not sure why it does not in your scene, maybe some Evee thing ? Anyways, duplicating and flipping normals should have done the trick.
When I look at your trees I noticed that the single “branches” might be too small and evenly shaped compared to the attached image. The main fix might be the lighting, their lit parts are way too bright right now. A darker green -blueish tone would be better. Even though they are stylized you could look at real trees in a night lighting, they are much darker.
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
