Behind the Scenes: My True Mentor. My Guiding Moonlight

INTRODUCTION

Hello there, I’m Haewen, a programmer and hobby artist from Hungary.

I've been dabbling in art in some shape or form all my life. I started learning Blender around 2018 after seeing the famous donut tutorial and have been using it on and off ever since.

In the past year, I managed to create more than before, thanks to the weekly challenges on the Create with Clint Discord.

INSPIRATION

I created this piece for one of those challenges, in the theme of “Legendary Weapon.”

I wanted to create a giant, magical old weapon left over from an age before ours, abandoned deep within a dense forest. I'm a huge fan of From Software games so for the weapon itself, I drew inspiration from the Moonlight Greatsword often found in their games.

Moonlight Greatsword as seen in various From Software games:

Image from From Software

PROCESS

Referencing

I started by gathering a bunch of pictures of forests to have a baseline and then quickly jumped into Blender to try to block out the scene with some basic shapes and a sword I found on Sketchfab.

I really wanted the scene to have a nice sense of scale, and I knew I would struggle with it, so it was good to have something to play that was easy to tweak.

Modeling

After that I jumped into modeling the actual sword I would use.

I'm not a great modeler and the sword would only be seen from one angle in one image, so I didn't spend much time worrying about tiny details.

Once it was roughly what I wanted, I gave it some quick materials and put it in the scene.

Scene Building

Then, I started building out the scene around it. I didn't have too many options for the big tree, so I ended up using an English Oak from Moonik Tree that had some roots on it.

For the foliage, I used one of the preset biomes from The Plant Library, and for the other trees in the scene, I used some of the trees from Botaniq.

Lighting

The lighting is very simple—there is no HDRI—there is a single sun lamp doing most of the work. Other than that, there is an extra area light aimed at the sword hilt and a negative light aimed at the foreground.

To make the sun rays look more scattered, I added some planes with a noise texture plugged into the alpha to filter the light a little bit.

As a word of caution, I do not recommend doing the negative light thing, for it can lead to some very weird results as I found out later in other projects.

Example of shading issues from a negative light:

The blade of the sword emits some light as well. It's a glass material for the surface and a principled volume with some noise going in the emission color and emission strength.