One of my most recent environmental projects I had created in my final semester at university. Completed over the course of about 3 weeks, I’m quite pleased with how it turned out. It had been quite a while since I had the chance to work on some more environmental art (which is essentially how I got seriously started in 3D), since I was busy with school and work. This was a great chance to return to my roots in a way and see how I’ve improved. Another nice thing was the requirement that everything we did for this project was done ourselves, this meant no using asset libraries for foliage or plants, so I got a chance to really practice my skills with plants, ivy, trees. The only real shortcut I took was using a base model for the character on the stairs, which I figured wouldn’t be problem since I would be modeling clothes on, and it’s not a primary focus of the piece anyway.

The final scene is a couple million polys in total, plus a bit more due to some render micro-displacements. Various objects were textured in both Substance Painter, and some procedural textures done in Blender.

Foliage created with transparent planes and grass textures. Trees created using Blender’s skin modifier to get the base shape, then sculpted into final shape. Vines and ivy created with more transparent planes wrapped around a cylinder and using the Curve modifier to allow for easy placement.

Final compositing done in both Blender and Photoshop

Created based on this lovely 2D illustration I had found on Pinterest, unfortunately I didn’t save the author’s name.