Behind the Scenes: Stepped Field

INTRODUCTION

Hi, my name is Fred Wallace, and I’m an architect and Blender fan in NYC. I discovered Blender a couple of years ago and have been obsessed ever since. It's like being a kid in a candy store; I have an endless backlog of stuff I want to explore with it, which, of course, just keeps growing.

This isn't my first article on BlenderNation; I have previously written an article on one of my artworks, Delta Ice Storm. You can check it out for tips on creating a realistic snowy environment in Blender.

INSPIRATION

For inspiration, I came across this image and decided to take a stab at emulating it in Blender. It looked challenging:

PROCESS

A few of the challenges included getting the rolling mist on the mountain right, emulating the stepped landscape plants, and, of course, modeling the landscape itself.

ENVIRONMENT

For the field in the foreground, I just freehand knife-cut a subdivided plane in the plan view to get contours I liked, and then extruded each section individually.

The bridge I nabbed from Sketchfab, credit to Szakal.

The mountain in the distance is just an A.N.T. Landscape mountain, which I scaled and trimmed to suit my needs. I vertex painted two simple textures on it to get the green surface and the little winding road.

VEGETATION

The straw bales are just cubes with a subsurf mod, and I wound up using a hair particle system on them to get the straw itself. I tried doing this just with textures, but it didn’t look right.

The plants are all scattered using Geo-Scatter, with some manually placed GeoScatter and Botaniq trees. The rest of it is just two textures I grabbed from Ambient CG and mixed.

MIST

The diagonal mist on the mountain was one of the trickier parts. I wound up making one with the TrueVFX TrueSky tool; it’s extremely powerful and let me tweak it to get what I needed.

And here is the render straight from blender! 

POST-PROCESSING

Eventually, I had settled on the blender's render as the final image but GurjasStudios on BlenderArtists helped me understand that there was still something missing from the render. Shout out to him for some great photoshop tweaks in dialing the final image.

The process was pretty simple. I added a camera raw filter to the image and gave the grass a yellowish tint, which got me 90% of the post-processing. Then, I desaturated the sky and added a gradient on the top half of the image while turning the opacity down.

Below is the final post-processed image. I hope you like it!

RENDER - Stepped Field

Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass alone, so you can see the model a little more clearly:

Thank you for reading. Feel free to ask any questions, and if you like my work, follow me on social media. Have a great day!

About the Artist                       

Fred Wallace is an architect and 3D artist in NYC who'd really rather be doing stuff in Blender all the time.