Rocky Mountain Landscape

Rocky Mountain Landscape

This past week I set out to make a big environment render, which is something that I have struggled with in the past. While it definitely wasn't easy, I'm pretty satisfied with the result.

The foreground is made up of some planes with plants scattered on top using geometry nodes, plus rock assets from Quixel Megascans. I used some of these to bridge the gap between the foreground and the big mountain at the centre of the scene.

The mountain itself is made in Gaea 2.0. Scattering plants on it turned out to be very costly for my computer, so I instead duplicated some of the foreground planes in areas that could really use the foliage, then added cliff assets to create a more interesting shape. On top of the mountain I placed some free castle scans from Sketchfab.

To tie it all together I covered the entire scene in volumetric fog with a blue tint, to make the mountain seem farther from the camera. The sky and lighting combine an HDR texture with Blender's sun.