Process:
Terrain Generated in Gaea,
I had created the trees for a previous project of mine, used the sapling addon for the base trunk/branches, then added alpha planes of the leaves using textures from textures.com
The fog is an alpha plane of a cloud/dust that’s using a particle system over the terrain.
The sky behind is an image I found online, scaled and zoomed in heavily to just have its clouds visible, and I used a volumetric fog cube to sorta mask the now low-res clouds.
Here’s it together in blender:
Used Cycles to render 128 samples at 1920x1080 with 200% resolution scale effectively 3840x2160, and used the OptiX denoiser, raw render:
With some colour correction/white balance/levels in Photoshop:
Overview of the scene’s progression:
Edited for better thumbnail:
