Nah don’t worry, they’re warm and toasty inside. Fur-lined 🔥

I spent a very long time on the terrain textures, particularly getting the masking just right (for areas where snow has melted, patches of deeper snow, the path having very little, etc). I tried lots of different approaches but didn’t like the effects or they looked weird.

And then lots of troubleshooting errors like weird speckling effects in the trees when rendering, trying to balance the sky contrast so you can still make out clouds when the sun is so blinding, odd displacement errors on the terrain causing weird shading.

I’m sure I could probably streamline my workflow a bit. The little tweaks always take ages for me. They probably don’t have to, but I love trying things and often get lost in making changes that probably don’t even matter that much 😂

What an honour 🙏

Thank you! ❤️

Just a smoky hut where the locals look at you strangely

Pretty much what four@lemmy.zip said. I usually start by making the foreground terrain, find a good angle which frames the terrain nicely and add a few assets to find the composition I’m going for and roughly block out where things are going to be.

Here’s an early render of the scene with just a few buildings and completely different lighting:

Once that’s all locked down, I start building from there. The next thing I did was start masking and sculpting the terrain, added the path and fixed displacement, then started building up assets slowly (fences, extra buildings, vegetation) to fill the empty areas, trying to emphasise parts of the image based on composition guides (thirds). Sometimes the camera will change very slightly during this, but not more than a few degrees at a time.

Then it was lighting, volumetrics (clouds, fog, fires), particle effects (birds, snow, embers), smaller assets (shrubs, fences, barrels / shields / skulls). After that it just becomes lots of tiny tweaks to colour, render effects (dispersion, rainbows) until I’m happy.

This was a few iterations ago before many of the last tweaks were added over the final 20 or so hours

Thanks! Blender is such a good piece of software. The fact it’s FOSS is just mind-blowing

Thanks! Yeah it was rendered with Cycles with 4096 samples.

Had to use a looooot of samples on this one because the combination of dark areas, lots of volumetrics, subsurface scattering on snow, small light sources, etc made for a very noisy render which even the denoiser couldn’t clean up that well 😅 usually I’d just do 128 or 256

Thanks! I’ve had the opposite problem before - rendered a complex scene in summer and pushed my flat up to a toasty 26°C 😭

Surprised I had to scroll so far to see ZorinOS mentioned. I love it, and it’s pretty user friendly for people new to Linux

Thanks! I couldn’t make my mind up on a subject, so this time I just started by building the background of the scene and kept going that way. Eventually I decided the lack of a subject could itself be a subject.

There’s something quite jarring about a detailed scene which feels like something crucial is missing

New scene, made with Blender 🙂