INTRODUCTION
Hello!
I’m Emmanuel Lorant, a 3D artist from France.
I went to 3D thanks to Blender in 2012 with the introduction of the 2.6 version. I wanted to learn something new, Blender was free, and as I was never very good at drawing, I thought that I could create some great, or at least better, images than my drawings with a 3D software.
I dug as many tutorials as I could on Youtube and tried everything doable in Blender, from modeling and texturing to camera tracking, and VFX.
Some events in my life made me think I have to make a living from something I love (I was a stay-at-home dad) and so, I started as a freelance 3D artist in 2018. I’m teaching Blender too for some companies in France.
INSPIRATION
I live in France, in Provence at Marseille, and we are surrounded by cliffs named “Calanques”. I started from a picture of these cliffs and I would like to make something more colorful.
I focused on recreating the mood and have something visually appealing.
PROCESS
I only worked with Blender and its compositor.
It’s unusual for me to work by “just” putting pieces together. I think it’s the first time I didn’t model anything for work.
Environment
I started by adding a large circle of 15 km of diameter. I noticed that a circle works better than a plane for the horizon. I extruded the circle to add some depth and added a material which is a combination of 2 noise textures and a Principled BSDF and a Principled Volume BSDF.
Assets
Next, I added a pine tree from the Forestation add-on that I put at the left side of the image. I duplicated it, placed it on the right, and cut it in Edit mode to have the shape I wanted.
For the trees at the bottom, I used 2 trees from Vegetation add-on as I need less details than the trees on the sides.
These trees give some kind of natural vignette effect as they surround the boat.
I added a cliff called the Grand Canyon from the Mountain Scapes add-on. I tried other cliffs and with advice on BA forums, I went to the Grand Canyon at the end. We find these kinds of cliffs in Provence. A bit less red but kind of.
I added the boat which I have in my asset library. The materials were old so I did a rework on them to achieve what I want. I then added 2 characters to bring life to it.
Lighting
For the lighting, I used an HDRi from PolyHaven called “lonely_road_afternoon_puresky”. I pushed the saturation to 2.000 to have something more colorful and warmer. I changed the orientation to give more interesting light to the trees.
Once everything was in place, I added a big cube around elements to add volumetrics. I put the density of the Volumetrics shader very low : 0.0001.
Post-processing
I used Quick Compo to add some vignette, lens distortion, and a little bit of color correction to make the final touch.
I started from this and thanks to advice on Blender Artists forum, I ended with my final image.
RENDER: Sea View
Thank you for reading and do check out my social media!
About the Artist
Emmanuel LORANT is a 3D artist from Marseille, France, working as a freelancer.
