A new landscape ‘painting’ project. This was voted Britain’s Favourite View a few year’s ago. It is the famous Wast Water (or Wastwater) viewpoint in the English Lake District.
Uses DTM data from DEFRA (1m). QGIS used to clean and clip the data to what I want. Also used QGIS to create masks for the lake, woodland, roads and - to come - locations of the buildings. I also used QGIS to create some of the basic colour maps to use in Gaea (or Mixer or Blender, if I need to use one of these later on).
Gaea to convert to a mesh. For a change, I’ve also used Gaea for all of the texturing apart from the water (for this ‘style’ it has worked quite well). Used Blender to mix in the water material.
Rendered in Blender. Trees from botaniq. Uses the standard sky texture with a sky backplate. Only 200 samples. Optix denoiser (will increase samples once I get close to my ‘beauty’ render)
All post processing done in Photoshop.
Sometimes I just don’t understand this forum. There are so many great renders like this one that go totally unnoticed.
Dude this wip is already looking almost like a real thing!
Keep it up man!
Amended the main material a bit - also keep playing with the post processing in Photoshop - particularly the colour grading and trying to perfect the ‘painterly’ effect I like.
Added a subtle amount of mist (tried volumetrics but couldn’t be bothered to wait for the increased render time - might persevere with that, but for now just a simple mist pass - might have overdone it a tad though. Think I prefer #1)
Added footpaths (from OSM) and the main road (but hard to see at this angle).
Still more to do. Although Wastwater isn’t particularly verdant, there needs to be a bit more in the way of random shrubbery. Critiques welcomed.
More random bushes scattered about the place (quite detrimental to render times with only limited improvement in image… perhaps when I notch up the resolution)
Included the only building you would really be able to see from here (Bowderdale Farm, just peaking out between some trees… as it does in real life).
Colour variation (subtle) in the trees, added some sheep in the fields (extremely small!), finally managed to get some rotational variation in the trees too (that was causing me more trouble than it should have done - such a noob!)
I think this is pretty much done. Maybe some final test renders looking at different light, sky and resolution.
Variation on a theme - but this time pulling out to see the famous ‘Wastwater Screes’. Lots to do in terms of lighting, texture, vegetation, buildings etc… if I can be bothered or get time (heavy two or three weeks of real life work coming up… BOOO! )
As with scene 1 - post processing for a more painterly look in photoshop. Trees from botaniq. Main terrain material Gaea. Terrain created using data from DEFRA, cleaned and prepped in QGIS (along with OS and OSM data for position of geographic features - although some masks created by hand using PS and aerial photography). Sky is a backplate - using basic sky texture.
#2 - Updated with corrected normals. Not sure I like the material on the ‘screes’ - we’re too close, so they look a bit naff. May have to do something more detailed.
Wow I love terrains like this, I used to make world machine renders like this all the time. Amazing work. Is there a tutorial or something you followed to achieve this? Workflow? Any tips? I’ll be starting on a similar project tomorrow
@backup_account This is the result of a lot of trial and error (mostly error) and just playing around. I can’t point you to any particular tutorials, but I do a lot of googling to work out how to do certain things and they all come together to make something look OK. I’m still working on the workflow for this myself - hence all the errors. I have a geographical background and use GIS a lot for work. I also love opensource geographical data - and there is a lot out there.
I know there are videos on YouTube of workflows that probably end up with better results than this using BlenderGIS (great tool!). I do use this to bring in some things into the scene, but I like to use Gaea to enhance my heightmaps before bringing them into Blender.
#3 Scene 2 updated. Changed the materials, tweaked the vegetation, added some walls and fences in the foreground and a building (which is roughly there in real life, but have taken some lazy artistic license over architecture!). Nearly there (any comments for improvement always welcome).
Thanks - yes, I see what you mean. I wonder if its the roughness and/or something introduced when messing around in photoshop. Always a good excuse for another bit of playing with it. Cheers!
Started working on another viewpoint - needs some fine tuning, but I like the composition. These are now my two ‘standard’ post-processing outputs from Photoshop. Obviously, we are into the realm of diminishing returns, but I’m having fun, so I don’t care
These are beautiful expressions of nature. Thanks for sharing. They are amazingly realistic.
I don’t know for sure, but I hadn’t clicked on this thread for a while because I thought it was Waste Water WIP. It’s unfortunate for the name, but someone not familiar with it, might hesitate to visit. You may go with “Landscape Painting WIP” or “Lake Landscape”. Just some suggestions.
Think I’m calling this one done - but won’t be uploading a ‘final’ version as it would just be spam!
Thanks everyone for the kind comments on this work so far. I have one idea for one more ‘scene’ and then I think it will be time for a new location and some different ideas. Always learning, always (hopefully) improving!
I think I have got a bit better over the years… this was my first attempt at this kind of thing a while ago. At the time (and I was an extreme beginner) I thought this was quite good (I don’t know - maybe I haven’t got that much better )
Been a while, but still in the same place. Started again, built higher resolution meshes for the mountains and redone the materials from scratch - trying to improve on what I’ve done before and keep improving my small skillset. Different viewpoint nearer the lake shore. Its a very rocky place, which allowed me to scatter a lot of rocks and pebbles picked up from all over the internet (using geometry nodes rather than particle system - using this scene as a test bed and learning exercise - although obvs using them for their most simplistic purposes).
As usual, post processing done in PS, using the same ‘painterly’ processes.
There is a lot I really like about this image, but still quite a lot to do to get it ‘just so’ (mainly material related).
Congratulations
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(I don’t know - maybe I haven’t got that much better 
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