LogInRickhard Norberg told us how he created this stunning photorealistic landscape, detailing modeling the mountains and texturing the grass pods using Gaea and Blender.
Introduction
Hi, my name is Rickhard Norberg, I'm a Swedish 3D Generalist. I got into 3D during COVID, like a lot of other people, due to boredom and feeling stuck at my current job. I have a friend who's been in the industry for about 15 years. He got me to download Blender, and three months after completing the infamous donut tutorial, I applied for a VFX education here in Stockholm and got accepted. I graduated in 2023 and have been doing it since then. So far, I've been doing some modeling and lighting for a couple of animated movies. Currently, I'm working on a trailer for an upcoming game, which has been a lot of fun.
Inspiration & References
I started this environment while being between projects. I was randomly scrolling Pinterest for inspiration because I wanted to do a landscape scene since I'm into doing that kind of stuff. I came upon this image of a place called Northon Salt Flats, and I liked the composition of it. I only used this image for reference; I felt that it just needed it for the composition and the look of the little pods of grass. The hill in the background was a bit boring, so I thought I could make some more interesting-looking mountains to spice it up a bit.
Modeling
The mountain is a basic setup in Gaea. I just combined two different mountain nodes to get the shape of the mountain. Then, I used an erosion node to get a more natural look on the mountain. After that, I used a height and slope mask with some warping and blurring to define where the rock and grass appear on the terrain. I've provided a screenshot from Gaea of the node network. Nothing fancy at all. I barely use the color output from Gaea; I use it to lay it over my textures in Blender to get some color variation in the textures.
Texturing
For the texturing in Blender, I used two different rock textures from Quixel and blended these with a noise texture to get some variation in the texture. The same goes for the grass and the soil for the grass pods in the foreground. For the grass on the grass pods, I made a couple of different patches of grass in varying sizes to get some variation in those as well. After that, I scattered them on top of the pods using geometry nodes. The water is just a plain that I made a water texture for; I also placed some fog over the water to make it a bit more interesting.
The grass pods are big, subdivided cubes that I shaped with proportional editing, trying to get the right look according to my reference. After that, I sculpted them a bit in order to get some variation in height so that they wouldn't look perfectly flat, as that quickly breaks the realism. As for the mud on the ground, that's a big plane that I also subdivided a bunch in order to be able to sculpt a little ditch into it where the water would have eroded it down.
Lighting & Rendering
For the lighting, I used the Physical Starlight and Atmosphere add-on, which is great as you get a good-looking sky to go with it and add stars. If you are making a night scene, I would highly recommend it! You can easily get the same result with just a sky texture and a photo of some clouds behind the mountains if you don't feel like purchasing an add-on.
For rendering, I didn't use any extra passes as i felt it wasn't needed. I used the standard settings and a sample count of 500, which is usually enough to get a crisp image. After rendering, I used the free version of DaVinci Resolve to do some color grading, added some glow and grain to get that film camera feeling, and that is it!
Conclusion
The entire project was finished in a day; nothing in this render demands much time if you have a clear vision of what you want to create. Once you've done the shading setup in Blender a couple of times and gotten a bit comfortable in using Gaea, the process is rather quick. You can, of course, get bogged down in details like always, but you can get 90% of the way relatively fast.
What took the most time on this project is probably trying to get the shading on the mountain to look how I wanted it to, and trying out a bunch of different grass models to get something that felt fitting for the scene. Looking back at it, I should have probably gone for some better-looking grass, but hey, hindsight is 20/20, they say!
If you want an in-depth tutorial on texturing mountains like this, I'd recommend checking out Maarten Nauta's YouTube channel; he's got some good videos on landscapes in Blender. Also, check out Aaron Westwood's ArtStation; he makes some truly mindblowing landscapes. I hope to one day make something half as impressive as his stuff!