Photorealistic Landscape

Blender Courses Show
#1

After completing Grant’s Game World’s course I thought I’d attempt a photorealistic landscape. This is just a practice piece as I needed to implement stuff I’ve learnt over the last couple of weeks.

I’ll be working on the close up stuff next as I’ve yet to implement the finer details which are unnecessary for an aerial shot.

Most important lesson for this type of heavy scene is to optimise viewport settings. Even with a 128gb ram & 4090 card blender crashed on me until I optimised.

Hope you like it!

landscape2
landscape23840×2160 1.67 MB

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#2

Nice.
Many years ago we had Brice 3d for world renders.
You don’t need a high end system.
It is all about procedural rendering

Search the web Brice 3D world

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#3

It´s the vegetation scattering that kills Blender but that´s only because the viewport can’t handle scatters over large areas which can amount to millions of assets for things like grass and flowers etc. Luckily there´s a ton of optimisations you can make.

The renders aren´t an issue at all as everything is instanced.

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#4

Very nice. Not covered at all in the courses sadly. Making proper not game worlds.
Scatter with particles/hair or geonodes?

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#5

I used the Geo-Scatter add-on, which as you probably know is a geonode system. The advantage of the add-on is how highly configurable it is, coupled with the viewport optimisations I mentioned previously.

1 Like
#6

This is really stunning! I don’t think I’ve seen anyone tackle quite this realistic of a landscape in Blender before (at least not one quite this vast). I really like the rolling fog and volumetric clouds you have as well - looks fantastic! Well done! Those trees must have really taxed your system (although 128gb ram and a 4090 - I’m jelly :)).

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#7

Wow, high praise indeed! Thanks so much for your kind words :slight_smile:

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#8

You deserve even more, especially if you made it through all of Rob Tuytel’s Creating 3D environment’s course. I bounced off not even halfway through because it was far too taxing on my system. Perhaps now that there are updated tutorials for the later versions of Blender, I may get back into that. For now, I’m trying to improve my character modeling, so I’m focusing on those tutorials that Gamedev.tv offers.

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#9

I haven’t done Rob´s course yet, although I do have it in my library. So far I´ve only done the Gamedev courses and then jumped in at the deep end into photorealistic stuff.

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#10

Ah, I misread your post. You did Grant’s environment course. That’s the next one I’m diving into after I finish with the geometry nodes course. Rob’s has a non-game asset environment course that creates some seriously heavy amounts of polys, but by gawd! The scenes are stunning. I hope to get back to it soon.

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#11

Yeah I´m definitely going to tackle Rob´s course now I have the hardware. Well anyway I wish you luck in your 3D journey!

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#12

This is the final render where I’ve addressed some feedback I’ve received on another platform:

  • Low res mountain: I upped the resolution of the mountain textures and increased the polycount of the mesh
  • Mountain scale: I altered the tree/mountain scale to make the landscape appear larger and also moved the atmospheric haze closer to the foreground
  • Foliage variance: I’m not sure if you can make it out at the scale and distance but I have added tree variants to the forest biomes
  • Scatter patterns: I’ve implemented patterns to all scatters and cleaned up some of the flow channels to exclude trees and shrubs
  • I’ve also attempted to improve the clouds

mountain
mountain3840×2160 1.47 MB

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