(yes, another musical reference to the old classics…)
Dear Blender artists,
Another attempt of me trying to get better in environmental modelling.
For this project I did not set a time limit. Instead, I took my sweet time to do things at the best of my ability and have fun!
Following some valuable feedbacks from @ar2 (see Rock the casbah), I also incorporated some small scale details. Those little details really bring that extra something! Thanks @ar2.
Rocks
Rocks (both foreground and background) are procedural + adaptive subdivision modifier. I also blended some PBR material for moss and grass using a combination of random noise and normal as mixing factor.
Buildings
Buildings are low(ish)-poly and were modeled from scratch (using photographic references, of course).
Materials and textures
Textures were created in Substance Painter starting from some basic (pbr) materials from textures.com and freepbr.com.
Trees and vegetation
Base models come from cgtrader.com. I used some of the free assets available there to create a simple biome for the forest using various particle systems.
Original models were modified quite a lot. Still credits are due:
- Bonsai japanese pine tree Free 3D model (www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/plant/flower/animal-594de763-f911-4080-bc42-521e1fef3735)
- XfrogPlants Chestnut Free 3D model (www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/plant/other/xfrogplants-chestnut)
- American Elm tree Free 3D model (www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/plant/conifer/american-elm-tree-78c0a9f7-078f-40cf-bbd9-236c991cb019)
- Elm 14m Free 3D model (www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/plant/other/elm-14m)
FX
Volumetric fog was created with the volume scatter shader using a noise texture for the density.
Clouds and fog were created using the old trick of the “transparent cloud plane”. Clouds were painted in Krita using the default textured brushes.
Rendering
Rendering was done in cycles (blender 3.2, experimental features enabled), 4k resolution and 2048 samples on a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070.
Renderings took between 15-30 min (depending on the image).
Compositing
Rendering was done in 3 passes: background, forest (+mist) and foreground (+volumetric fog). Passes were composited together in blender.
Final adjustments on saturation/contrast and color corrections were done in Krita using filter layers (for repeatability).
That’s it. Everything is pretty standard.
Hope you enjoy it!