A Large-Scale Mountain Castle Environment Made in Blender

The scene was created by Maarten Nauta.

Have a look at God's Valley, a gorgeous large-scale mountain castle 3D scene created by Environment Artist and 3D Generalist Maarten Nauta.

Inspired by Lorenzo Lanfranconi's works, the scene was created using Blender, Gaea, Megascans, Quixel Bridge, SpeedTree, and The Grove 3D and, according to the artist, took four days to render in two separate tries. Additionally, the author utilized BD3D's renowned Geo-Scatter plug-in to scatter the assets throughout the valley and a self-made Classic Mountain Pack to set up the mountains.

"The biggest challenge of this project was managing the memory usage at the very end. I use a 3060ti so I only get to spend 8Gb of VRAM," commented the creator. "Next to scaling down textures I still had to make space for the huge alembic files of the SpeedTree wind animations. I actually switched out most of the subdivision modifiers that showed nice micro-displacement in the foreground and instead I scattered "Micro-debris" which were actually tree logs and big boulders but on a tiny scale. Instancing those with Geo-Scatters "Manual Scatter" took way less memory than an adaptive subdivision but I think in the end the small rocks and twigs scattered on the road look more convincing than the displaced texture!"

And here are some WiPs shared by Maarten:

We highly encourage you to visit Maarten's ArtStation page to check out more of the artist's awesome environments. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

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