Once again I am back with a personal artwork. I used Gaea for making the terrain. Most of the coloring and shading was done in blender. In my personal opinion as of writing this, cycles by far has the most powerful shader network. The dune dust was made in Embergen and the VDB is just an emission shader. Tree model was made from scratch in SpeedTree.
Apart from technical work, this piece really speaks out my subconscious mind. We must go on.
Love this, the dune shape is perfect and i like that the wavy pattern is only present on the side that is swept by the wind, a lot of desert environment models miss this detail, the sand lifted up by the wind is also a cool effect, can you please share a better resolution picture of your shading editor nodes, would love to study.
Also do you think you could have done the modeling on blender instead of gaea, or maybe tell us more about the work process done in gaea.
Thanks (i know i focused on the desert but the tree is beautiful too)
mixing textures and their normal maps using geometry based masks. It’s very slopy could probably do a much cleaner mix but just wanted to focus on the art direction.
And as far as doing the terrain in Blender, I would assume someone more experienced in geo-nodes would attempt it, but it would be more mathematical than natural. Gaea has some really powerful nodes like erosion and thermal that give it a better look. But as far as getting the base shapes its fairly straight forward and I can get it up until the warping. You could probably fake the erosion and the sand waves as they were also just warped gradients. If there is any public interest I would love to make a quick breakdown video explaining the process. Thanks!
Love your work, would love to see a breakdown video, also would love to see some films you have worked on! Also, any recommendations for getting from a model, slightly, or not at all textured to a finished render, because I have a slight issue of making a detailed (comparatively, I am sure any blackouts of yours are better than mine) model to a finished render like this?
