I made this scene to test out the new version of my addon, Alpha Trees, which I used to make and scatter the trees.
In total, it was about 5 hours of work time, with most of that being taken up with creating the procedural landscape with geometry nodes, and shading it almost fully procedurally.
There are around 1,000,000 individual tree particles in each frame, but despite that, it still renders in just 1m30s on my 4yo laptop GPU!
Yeah, sure!
Here are some stats:
Blender version: 3.0 (with Cycles X)
resolution: 2500 x 1000
samples: 15
particles: ~1,000,000
render time: 1 m 30s
laptop: HP pavillion power 15
RAM: 16 GB
VRAM: 2 GB (The minimum recommended for cycles)
For the animation, to get rid of noise I turned up the samples to 40, which put the render time up to ~7 mins
Have you tried following some tutorials, there are some quite good ones for this kind of subject. This is the tutorial that really got me into making nature scenes:
It’s pretty old, and it uses 2.79, which isn’t great, but almost all the theory for making nature scenes still works. It’s long, but it’s worth a watch.
Otherwise, the only tips I could give would be to always use more particles than it looks like you need in the viewport, and that good compositing is one of the most important things to make it look good.
Sorry if that’s a bit vague, hope it helps!
Instead of using the mist pass, use the depth pass. By default, it has the full distance at every pixel, so to get a useable version, pass it through a normalize node to get it in a 0-1 range.
Then, because it also has a lot of fireflies (but a lot less than the mist pass), pass it through a few despeckle nodes.
I usually add one, play with the values until it removes the most noise, then add another one and repeat until the image is clean.
Nothing more to say…