How to Recreate a Scene from the Amboselli National Park in Kenya
Yash Jain talked about the creation process behind the Recreation of my Vacation Footage in Blender project, explaining how he built the terrain using an add-on and discussing how he created the mountain using Gaea.
Introduction
My name is Yash, and I've been working in 3D for around nine months to a year, but my background in VFX and editing goes back about 10+ years. My path into 3D was a little unconventional. I actually started as a kid editing Call of Duty montages and various YouTube videos in After Effects. Looking back, that was my first real exposure to working with cameras in 3D space, and once I started learning Blender, that overlap made 3D feel like a natural next step rather than a completely new discipline.
The real turning point came after I graduated college and started working full time. I found myself drawn back to my old creative hobbies, and that pulled me into really "locking in" and learning Blender. I fell in love with it almost immediately. Not long after, I entered my first competition, hosted by Sparkles, a Counter-Strike 2 YouTuber, and managed to place 5th, winning $4,000. That result gave me the push to take the hobby more seriously: I invested in a much more powerful PC built for creating art, and this project was the very first piece I made on that new machine.
Starting the Project, References, Composition & Blockout
I knew from the start that I wanted to recreate a scene I saw at the Amboselli National Park, so the project began with blocking out the landscape. I built the base terrain using the A.N.T. Landscape add-on in Blender combined with some basic sculpting tools, which gave me a foundation to build on. For composition, I separated the scene into three layers: foreground, midground, and background, which kept everything organized and much easier to manage as the project grew.
To match the original footage, I used Blender's camera background feature: after getting the initial landscape set up, I brought in the reference footage, set its opacity low, and matched my camera movement to it directly. Layering it that way let me line up my scene with the real camera motion as accurately as possible.
Assets, Terrain & Animation
The only elements built entirely from scratch were the camera movement, the landscapes, the animation, the lighting, the compositing, and the sound design. For the rest, I leaned on existing resources; the foliage came from Botaniq, and the elephant model was purchased from CGTrader.
For the mountain specifically, I wanted it to feel accurate to reality, so I turned to Gaea. I took real heightmap data and used Gaea to edit and refine it. Gaea was ideal for this because it outputs different map types that I could feed directly into my texturing process later on. The textures themselves were mixed using noise textures and position values from within Blender, combined with maps pulled from various sources.
Composition
Composition was one of the most interesting parts of this project. The work itself was fairly straightforward, but it was my first time experimenting with DaVinci Resolve's Fusion for heavier compositing work. I typically use After Effects, but I wanted to push myself to learn nodes, since they're generally considered better suited to a 3D workflow.
Matching the scene back to the original footage and making the final adjustments through Fusion's node system was a great learning experience. I go into more detail on this in my YouTube breakdown video.
Timeline, Challenges & Takeaways
The project took around a month and a half to complete, which was definitely longer than I anticipated, but I'm still really happy with how it turned out. What I enjoyed most was the constant process of looking up tutorials and slowly noticing myself relying less and less on Google. Over time, things started to become intuitive, and there's nothing quite like watching your work come to life.
The biggest lesson I took away was to stop chasing perfection. There were so many things I wanted to keep fixing, but I knew that if I did, I'd never actually finish. I'm proud of the final result as it stands. I also decided to create a full breakdown video for the project, which covers a lot of the process in more depth.
Breakdown video:
Overall, it was an extremely fun project to work on, and it gave me a lot of motivation heading into my next pieces. For tutorials, there's a long list I could recommend, but honestly, Andrew Price is a great starting point, and beyond that, simply searching "how to [anything] in Blender" on YouTube will get you remarkably far. There's a tutorial out there for almost anything you'd want to make — I think it's a huge part of what makes learning Blender so fast.
