This is an attempt to recreate a path I used to walk as a child before moving to the city.
The goal is to achieve realism, and while there’s still much to improve, I’m proud of the progress so far. I’m eager to gain more experience and tackle a wider variety of environments.
I’d love to hear your feedback!
Blender Guru has an item about realism. He mentioned 3 main things, I remember one: Add film grain. Maybe you can find it on YouTube
I don’t know if a found the right one but I did some light adjustments and apply some tips over photoshop
Here is the result so far
Very nice indeed the trees are particularly effective not being plain trunks and conventional perfect branches.
Last version spoils it a bit with unrealistic balancing rocks!
Hahah xd thank you! I saw a movie where there was a challenge that if someone could balance stones like that it was a profe of witch powers I couldn’t resist 
I grew up playing in the woods, so this projects concept got me feeling emotionally whimsy! The shots are looking super gorgeous. I really love the depth of field and lighting changes you made for this newest image.
I think you could still find a way to do a balanced rock tower that looks like it has been there a while. These ones simply look like they were just placed for the photo, which is fine since they still look beautiful in the scene, and it makes sense humans would place them along the path.
I wear glasses IRL so I’m likely influenced on this thought- but the detail on the leaves of the bushes behind the rocks are the only thing that stand out to me as a little ‘too in focus’.
Really hope to see more images of these, you’ve got me desperate to try and learn realistic environments in blender again myself.
Hey! Thank you so much for your words, they really mean a lot to me and your insight about the rock towers is spot on. I love the idea of making them feel like they’ve been part of the forest for a while.
Really glad the render sparked your interest to revisit realistic environments in Blender, I’d love to see what you create too!
I suggest you to learn about geometry nodes it really helped me. Most of the scene is generated in that way, I just made a few hand painting with color vertex and very few sclupting to shape path close to the camera besides that work with real world scale, the first render that I did was okay but something was off every time until I saw how big was everying. After fixing that the lights and sense of depth came even without the help of photoshop really.
Which ones are the photos and which ones are renders? Geometry nodes eh? Thanks for sharing such excellent work!
I would be interested to know polygon count but presumably few texture maps with geometry nodes?
It is hard to say, I know they are above of what is expected for better performance but when I first made the trees there where 144,090 vectex and other even more but I get them to have from 3k-12k
On the general scene I am using proxies on the viewport otherwise the pc would crash so I dont have a precise number
Yes well I have discovered if you are doing animations it is better to have a simpler scene. But the good thing about ultra real models is that you can use them to create nice backgrounds, so then only graphics memory.
You’re right!
