Boulder Valley

Hey everybody! This took me... a LONG time to get to this point! I'm super super happy with how this turned out, and it was a great project to help reinforce all the stuff I've been working on for the past couple months. This piece definitely tells me I am a lot closer to achieving my end goal than I thought, even a week ago... (end goal being Dorian Marchesin, Aaron Westwood, Falk Boje, Oliver Vernay-Kim, and many other's level environments). I used Gaea to create my terrain, it's an absolute blast to use that software. I then compiled a bunch of rock, grass, and tree assets. Trees custom created in MTree, some grass custom made + megascans, and boulders from megascans as well. The scene as a whole took about 15 hours to make. My advice to anyone working on large scale environments like this is to not judge your piece until EVERYTHING is stuck in there, assuming you have the right composition etc. For example, If I took the trees out of here, it'd look like crap. If I took the grass out of here, it'd look like crap.. but all together it works haha. Oh I also spent a ton of time optimizing the scene for better render times. Eventually I will be making films, so if this is going to be animated it needs to be somewhat optimized. Render time was ~2 minutes at 4k.
Rendered in Cycles, 300 samples.