Tree on a Hill (Nature Scene WIP)

JSBach1801 · May 29, 2022, 7:46pm

Hello all.

I used to use Blender a bit about a decade or more ago. Just getting back into it now and thought I would try something “simple” which was to model a tree. Of course, you can’t just model a tree only, so it turned into this WIP scene.

Some things being worked on:

The grass right now it is a hair particle system, but I found some nice grass elements that will work better.
More flowers of different shapes and colors.
Better tree bark texture.
Better mountains. The scale is not right.
The clouds and sky are an image layer. I want them to be totally procedural.
Maybe some butterflies, bees or a far off bird or two?
Light volume scattering giving some God rays on the tree could be cool.

Anyways,. with work and everything, I’ll be tweaking this for quite a while. However, I think it looks OK for not having used Blender for 10+ years.

Cheers!

JSBach1801 · May 30, 2022, 9:15pm

Tweaked the lighting a bit.

I also have reworked the mountains. I made some super low poly pine trees, one without snow and one with. Then I weight painted a couple of vertex groups and used those locations for a particle system for each. Turned out quite nice.

Next on my agenda is to redesign the wild flowers. There are going to be many more of them (think patches of flowers), and I am going to make them mostly yellow/orange in color. Also going to be done with particles.

Cheers.

joseph · May 30, 2022, 10:46pm

I think this newer render looks better, or at least more realistic. Good work!

JSBach1801 · May 30, 2022, 10:58pm

Thank you! Slowly getting better each time I work on it, I hope.

JSBach1801 · May 31, 2022, 3:19pm

Added more flowers! However, I do have a question.

The flowers are four separate models (four different colored flowers) then each is used in four different particle systems on the same mesh. I would like rotate each flower based upon it’s own local origin in a random way. (Mostly about the z-axis to spin the flowers so they face different directions, notice how each color flower is basically oriented in the same way.)

However, the rotation controls in the particle system (advanced hair) do not allow for this type of behavior. (Should it? Maybe I have something wrong?) Any thoughts? I would be happy to use Geo Nodes if that would do the trick, but I know basically nothing about them.

Renzatic · May 31, 2022, 4:21pm

Geo nodes would be the way to go here. Any scattering tutorial on Youtube will help you come to terms with them fairly quickly.

AgentTuron · May 31, 2022, 5:03pm

Hi there,
Let me jump in with a few suggestions, BUT, I have to say, I really love your work so far!

The flowers are much better now for distribution and colours. Check some real life examples for how they grow.
For the tree, lots of barks out there (guess choose something oak-ish), my take would be AmbientCG, PolyHaven or CGBookcase.

I’m not sure, but the mountain may be a bit better with more crackled, peaky, edgy complexity at the top. Since foliate covers the bottom, you may not need to re-do all, if you used a normal or position thingie, use it as a mask and add more noise over the top with whatever texture you like

For the grass? My very quick setup. What is the idea? More varied grass, based on the texture of the ground.
I don’t say it is the best solution, but it works

You add noise, or whatever you like to the plane, just make sure you use Position for coordinates.
Then copy this whole thing (I could not make attribute work), so copy this into the instance shader setup. You can also tweak the shades of the colour ramp, just keep the shapes and scale the same. (Pic 1-2)
Then mix (multiply most probably) this, with your own particle setup. Random per island adds even more extra. (Pic 2)
You can always pop in a map range to control the effect with the TO Min-Max.

Result? Random grass but controlled by the ground’s texture. Meaning you can create green vs yellow grass, or so. You can go much further with similar applications, but I stopped here (long day )

I used geo nodes for scattering (Pic 3), but no rotation or whatsoever, very basic, so make sure to check the videos down below

Also, I still love particles, I have some problems with geo-nodes, namely the compatibility with shader nodes, if it comes to landscape texture tweaks in the shader, and all that. Also procedural displacement is not a big friend of scattering stuff Anyways, lots of great tutorials, check out Ryan here, for a great geo-node tutorial (weight-painting approach):

Also, check out Blender Dude for more:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeDY5-JV9q6PDl_TcOUVk5g

Cheers!

JSBach1801 · May 31, 2022, 9:03pm

Lots to think about here! Thank you!

JSBach1801 · May 31, 2022, 11:40pm

More shapely mountains.

Also added a render mist pass to give a hint of atmospheric falloff to the mountains. It’s subtle, but it’s there. Going to work on modeling and generating the flowers with geo nodes over the next few days so I can get the variation I want. Got to watch some tutorials first!

JSBach1801 · June 3, 2022, 5:51am

Quick update before bed.

I redid the flowers entirely using geometry nodes from the base model all the way to the field distribution. It’s such a powerful way of doing it. Still tweaking the size, shape, and placement of the flowers though. I’m going to go back eventually and redo the grass as well with geo nodes. Right it is still particle generated.

I also retextured the tree bark. It looks much better now, I think.

Still need to recreate the sky and clouds procedurally, but one step at a time.

Cheers!

JSBach1801 · June 5, 2022, 8:19pm

Decided to completely redo the tree. It looked OK before, but using the Mtree addon, it’s now next level. Still need to play with the bark material some. Also, tweaked the flowers and grass. The only major thing thing left is to build the sky and replace the background image.