Onwards through work town

 I'm back at the day job, which I can do early while we're not in term time. I was intent on completing the next previs section, but I fell down another rabbit hole.

Quick project

I wanted to conduct a quick animation/post-production test, as I have a bunch of tools in this area that I'm unfamiliar with.

I'm happy with the post-work, but the horizon is too abrupt.

Added landscape meshes to fill out the background.

I had some difficulties with getting the scene to move forward, so I decided to restart and use a True Terrain landscape instead of a flat plain. Expensive!!

The overall vibe of the scene is better, but it needs a lot of work.

The cloud colour is a bit distracting, but I like how the rolling fog softens the horizon.

It's fun, but I really need to do better on the rocks and the scatter. I didn't want to use photogrammetry assets, such as Megascans; instead, I wanted to create my own rocks using RockIt V2. The real test will be completing a 360-degree animation that slowly turns around the globe.

Cards

I had a play with alpha cards. The distant mountains, the trees and the cloaked figure are not models; they're images rendered on a plane or on simple "cards", then placed in the scene and aligned with the camera. Doing this using a compositor is a lot more powerful, but this is a quick way to optimise resource-intensive renders. Blender 4.5 Beta, True Terrain 5, True-Sky, Photographer 5. The weird bronze statue with the tentacles was generated using Spark3D.

Key elements are not geometry; they're images projected onto planes or simple card models.