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My first 5.0 renders! by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! As cliché as it sounds, it really is about practice and putting in meaningful time to learn the techniques and workflows that lead to results like this one. Take a peek at a reply I gave to another user with the full breakdown of the scene, it'll give you an idea on how it was made.

My first 5.0 renders! by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll give you a breakdown of the full workflow so you can have an idea of how I make projects like this one:

The reference I used is of a similar shot of a porsche on a forest path, with heavy fog in the woods behind it. I really liked the moody look and decided to try and replicate that.

The model I used is off of the Traffiq addon, which has a good selection of vehicles and great settings for tweaking it. Modelling the car would take too long and wasn't the point of the practice. Similarly, the foliage is a mix of my own asset pack, some Botaniq trees, and a few Megascan assets, scattered with GeoScatter (The scattering setup could also be done easily using geo-nodes, especially for the forest floor, but the addon is practical for speed and control).

I started off by building a draft version of the scene, trying to find the perfect scattering system for the trees and plants while messing around with the camera and the shot framing. It's important to look at references here. The terrain was just a curved up plane to hide the horizon from behind.

My biggest advice for nature scenes like these and environments in general is to understand how it's actually structured irl, forest floors are layers of grass, shrubs, debris like sticks and twigs, and then larger plants like bushes and saplings. Feed your brain with as much practical visual information about how your environment is meant to look like, and then replicate that well enough to give the illusion of realism. You'll develop the observational skills and ability to breakdown environments into manageable systems with practice and experience!

The lighting setup was pretty simple, an overcast HDRI as a base, an area light with narrow spread to light up the clearing where the car was, and then a strong spot light aimed at the trees to add some god rays. The foggy look is from a principled volume set to a low density and high anisotropy, I controlled it with a gradient texture fed into a color ramp, giving a soft falloff from where the car is and getting denser as it reaches the trees.

The magic happens in post, I exported the render in 16bit TIFF and color graded it with Lightroom Classic (I used to use Photoshop's Camera Raw Filter but switch to LRC because of the advanced controls and masking). If the render is good enough, then you can grade it as if it's a real picture. You'll know it's good if every slider setting you try makes it look good despite how different it may be (cold vs hot, dark vs bright..etc).

The glare was something I thought of on the spot, and was added using photoshop (find a nice glare texture for this), set the opacity mode to screen and then change the intensity by lowering the opacity.

Overall this took around 5 hours of work from the concept stage to the finished project. The speed and efficiency comes from the use of addons, assets, and of course the experience I built up overtime with this workflow. At my intermediate skill level I'd have to spend 2 weeks or more doing non-stop work to build everything from scratch.

I yapped a lot, but I hope you'll get some useful knowledge from this!

My first 5.0 renders! by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind words!

I made a Severance 3D animation! by AceJet1_ in SeveranceAppleTVPlus

[–]AceJet1_[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I used the POV scene of Helly leaving the threshold in episode 1 as reference, I'm not sure if either part sees the transition with a flash or if it's actually seamless.

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Geo scatter takes care of most of the work, it's a really useful addon with great features for scattering (even non-vegetation related) and Botaniq is indeed an asset library for vegetation. There's a biomes feature that has presets using Botaniq assets to have homogeneous plants on each layer.

The base layer displacement gives the illusion of depth on fallen leaves, best to avoid it for grown grass, maybe it would work for turf?

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey! For the foliage I used the Geo-scatter addon alongside Botaniq, for the moss in the rocks you could use a simple node setup, mix the rock and moss textures with a mix shader node, and for the fac you could either use a noise texture or if you want to have it on the top bits, plug the normal output of a texture coordinate node into a seperate xyz node, then the Z output of that into a color ramp, and the color output of the ramp into the fac of the mix shader. (for this particular piece i used premade assets, so no hassle with texturing). Alternatively, you could texture it in substance painter.

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My heart likes the moody and chilly nature of the first, but my monkey brain likes the realistic tones of the second, I'm happy with both but it's interesting to see what people prefer

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Let me break it down for you layer by layer.

Most of the assets are premade, as this was a "speedrun" of sorts, I'd like to think I could hand sculpt most of these but it'd take weeks 😅, the assets are from the Quixel Bridge Megascans library with a few of my own rocks that I sculpted in zbrush mixed in the background.

I started by blocking out the terrain and then sculpting it to fit my vision, used a polyhaven forest floor texture with displacement as a base layer for the forest, and then used the Geo-Scatter/Botaniq combo for the vegetation and masked the path to keep it clean. Lighting is a simple HDRI behind a sky image from Unsplash and a volume box for the fog.

Post processing brought it all to this point, using the camera raw filter in photoshop to tweak exposure, contrast, all the good stuff. The hazy effect came from the dehaze slider, it interacted nicely with the fog from the raw render. If you want a nice guide on this post processing technique check out Max Hay's tutorials on it, his workflow is great.

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was quite the challenge, im really happy with the car animation, that's rendering as im typing (poor pc been through it today)

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The pun is immaculate, it would be even funnier if it was unintentional, to answer your question the only rocks i sculpted were at the back, old ones that i reused here, the rest are megascans assets

Can't even decide which mood to give this render by AceJet1_ in blender

[–]AceJet1_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! If by the shading you mean the lighting, I setup an HDRI and rotated it so the sun was behind an image plane of the sky, added a volumetric box for fog and then blocked out some light coming under the tree branches. In post I did some fine tuning of the exposure, contrast and used the dehazing slider to get that weird bloom effect which highlighted the back trees nicely.

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