Summer Thicket

This actually started as my quest to make better grass, but I fell in love with the particle systems and gradually came to this. I hope that some enjoy.


No one else’s models were use to build this scene, though Krzysztof Czerwiński is responsible for the textures of the birch trees - a fact which I omitted in my original post.

Well, it looks very realistic, I think, great work. :slight_smile:

very realistic,very nice.:smiley:

Great work, does look very real.

Brilliant!
But I think it should be some fog in the scene, to improve depth of the scene.

Thanks All! It’s a good feeling that people think it looks real. Blender is great for that.
For realism, there’s a lot of great tools: DOF, lense distortion and blur, mist, etc…scale of objects is a big thing, also the scale of land formations…all things that I struggled to try to get right.

@28 selves - there is mist in the scene though it’s hard to tell. (look towards the ground areas) I agree with you that pics need some depth, but I dialed it back a great deal so that it wouldn’t look fake or like there was a forest fire somewhere. My reference was memories of a lake area that I visited last summer.

I think personally that the whole composition of the piece might be helped by cropping the bottom and the top too - but I’m a fan-boy for the grass, weeds, branches and leaves! :slight_smile:

cropped version:


i wish i had by bedroom wall painted with this!!! Love It!!! :slight_smile:

Great work, i think a “less cropped” version of the second one will work well.
Maybe some more variation to the grass height and density especially where there are the trees (and shadows) will make the image more “interesting”.
Two questions…about the grass: is 2d, 3d, alpha masked, etc…? The trees are made with sapling addon?

I think the cropped version looks a little claustrophobic. With only the top pic to work with I would probably go for something more like this:


But to be honest that just looks a bit “rule of thirds-ey” now, which can look very generic. Anyway, post-pro cropping is not ideal IMO, it is better to get the composition to work with your frame in the first place.

There’s potential in the scene for some interesting subtle paths weaving their way through the forest. By that I mean the shallow valleys between the bumps in the ground. The first thing that came to mind for me was that the ditch that comes in from the right might have worked well to instead link up with an indentation that weaves away from the from the camera in one continuous line into the distance.

Wow, this is very nice, you especially nailed the trees! I’m gonna use this as motivation for my project :slight_smile:

Love it!
Nature is one of those things that looks easy, but really isn’t. Great job on pulling it off :slight_smile:

Thanks again all!

@mik1190 - grass is all 3d…no alpha. Trees ARE sapling! I was surprised at how well they came out. I agree about varying the grass…the forest should have more clutter too…logs different plants, seedlings etc…alas I have no time to do that right now, but may come back to it soon.

@Blender Matt - thanks for the great tips. I love cropping! I know that composition is key, but there’ve been so many times when an unexpected better pic shows up in the crop. Oh well. I might try working more with the land profile at a later time. (or with a different pic)

@mik1190 and neondrop Thanks! I was happy when I got the smaller branches in the trees to droop with the weight of the leaves…much realism there.

@ANDREWPRICE!!! WOW!!! Thanks for noticing this little pic. :stuck_out_tongue: It started as playing with grass and went from there. The GURU saying that I pulled it off made my day!!! looking forward to using what I learned here in my archviz!!!

What render engine did you use ?

How long did it take to render this scene ??

Thanks for response

Pulling off the modeling and grass on this - they’re both great. My only comment is that they don’t go together. Having grown up with these sort of trees a majority of my life, the ground underneath them is never grass. In early spring is a bed of dry leaves and broken twigs and in the summer it’s overgrown fern, tall grass and broken limbs. And even if the were planted in a field of grass, the leaves block sun, which would make the ground beneath the trees dead and brown.

I’d love to see how you could take the grass particles and turn it into more realistic ground cover.

More saturation :stuck_out_tongue:

This scene is really inspiring! The textures on the trees (birches?) are very convincing, this looks very similar to a park in my hometown. :slight_smile:

@Vincent - this is cycles and it was an overnight render. way too much for CUDA too. The big thing to learn here is that particles take WAY LESS MEMORY!

@natecreates - uhmm…all true what you say… :slight_smile: I’m working on a car now, but when I take a break from that I may come back to this and add some thickness under the trees. btw, If it’s true that you joined in 2010 and this is your first comment, I’m glad it was my scene that you lent your eyes to. Good critique for a lazy ‘artist’ (me).

@coolspotdreamer - No. The reason I say that is because I went back and forth on saturation…more would make it look too brilliantly green and that’s not what I was going for. Love the mug shot btw!! Is that really you?

@PostMirabilis - yeah I’ve seen your AA portfolio…you could knock off a coupla scenes like this in about five minutes. :wink: Truly honored though!! :)) Glad you liked it!!

I love where this image transports me! Thanks for that - Great work :slight_smile:

there would not be fog at that distance in the middle of the day for that scene. People have become obsessed with putting fog/DOF in every scene like they’ve just discovered lens flares in Photoshop.

No one else’s models were use to build this scene.

Those tree’s look very much like the collection donated to the 3d community by Krzysztof Czerwiński.