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Behind the Scenes: Forest Camp Illustration
🕑 Added 2024-08-09 15:24:47 +0000 UTC
This one is again more driven by desired techniques, than an inspirational idea. I'm always working on my skills and test new things and sometimes the time comes to give something a go and try on a new project.
In the past couple years, there have been some changes and new possibilities in Blender when it comes to NPR or cartoon rendering. The grease pencil got some overhaul, geometry nodes matured and with the 4.2 version, we got new EEVEE with raytraced global illumination.
I really wanted to try cartoon style grass and trees for a while now so I decided to build a forest scene. My first impulse was to go for a forest cabin or something like that, but when searching for inspiration, I came across few camping illustrations and thought it a great theme to try all the new things.
Visit the full Pinboard here
I set up a Pinterest board and filled it with shots that would help me direct the contents of the work as well as style and color choices. As I never launch Blender without a sketch first, this time was no different, but I took this one again tiny bit further with small color study.
I wanted to balance the natural forest and sky colors with the elements I wanted to guide towards, like a camper trailer and a tent, both bright and saturated colors. I think the combination worked fine within the sketch and the red tent offered a stable point of focus, so I moved on to set up the scene in Blender.
As this one is a perspective camera shot, the initial setup was slightly different, than isometric stylized scenes. I blocked out the terrain to create a small hill and placed a human armature for the scale reference. This way, I could block out and populate the rest of the layout, while maintaining the proportions.
Next thing to figure out was the grass. Few of the older techniques used particle hair system for this and I really liked the simplicity of it, but as I mentioned, I wanted to try new geometry node based hair curves. I think right now, this is the easiest way how to set up something like this.
You have all the hair nodes available for easy distribution and adjustments of the strands, but then you maintain full geometry node control and can easily do things like wind noise animation and transferring normals from the terrain to strands to use as shading attribute. If this sounds too complex to you, have a look at the YT video below at 0,25x speed and locate the hair setup part.
Finally, I wanted to give the new EEVEE a spin, but with raytracing doesn't exactly shine in the non-realistic situations. But even then, I was able to take advantage of it by first setting up a standard diffuse to RGB shader node setup and then overlaid the shadows from the principled shader on top for some extra depth. Worked like a charm.
You can watch the full process video on Youtube.
Comments
qDev
Watching right now on YouTube lol
