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!
