I wanted to try and make a quick environment based on one of the reference images I have in my Massive PureRef Inspiration File™, and I settled on this one of a kayaker in a fjord. Needless to say, I might have wanted it to be quick, but it ended up taking a couple weeks on/off instead. Anyway, hope you like it
The kayak, paddle and water bottle base models are from Sketchfab, which I then modified and strapped together to complete the boat.
The mountains are from Maarten Nauta’s Nordic Terrain pack. They’re very high quality (I only needed to use one for the whole scene), and for the price, would definitely recommend. (His youtube channel is also great)
The large water wake ripples are actually just sculpted onto the plane, and the animation comes from a geometry nodes setup which displaces the ripples with a looping noise texture:
The mountains are from Maarten Nauta’s Nordic Terrain pack. I’ve done quite a lot of experimentation with making terrains in Blender in the past, but unfortunately none of them have come close to the quality of the models that come out of dedicated programs like Gaea. I don’t really want to shell out $200 just for terrains though, so Maarten’s terrain packs are the next best thing. It’s also worth checking out his youtube channel for inspiration for Blender environments, some of the stuff he does is crazy good.
I only had to use one mountain model for the whole scene, each of them are just rotated and scaled variants of the same mesh.
One thing, I noticed rewatching the video is that even though the water is rippling, the camera doesn’t seem to be moving, so to fix this, even if you can’t animate the kayak/ripples in the water moving forward, you can also animate everything else moving toward the camera instead.
Yeah, I wanted it to be a perfect loop, so unfortunately that meant I couldn’t move the camera. I did try to fake it a bit with the ripples all moving towards the camera, but there’s a bit of a limit to how convincing that can be. Thanks for the feedback anyway, it’s good to know for future projects!
To be honest I didn’t put much thought into it, I just kind of placed it and forgot about it . The render times weren’t too horrible, I would probably have shrunk it down a bit if they were.
