Once the modelling was done, I immediately wanted to get the environment out of the way. Simply because it takes one of the main roles in my story. However, I didn’t intend to change the landscape, I had to slightly alter the vegetation and position of the sea, but the principle of having the pathway to the sea and presence of castle in the back stayed.

I started my work on improving ground planes, which I previously mocked up during modelling. I have now created planes with more polygons and have properly terminated edges where needed. To create uneven edge, planes intersect each other at a slight angle. After I used VRayDisplaceMod to create ground with a bit of snow. As if it was snowing in the morning and now it is melting, and ground is visible in places. I have also used displacement on the path to the building and then scattered a few cobblestones on top using ForestPack.

After finishing with ground I moved on to small vegetation. As I have already mentioned in my concept stage, I wanted to create a midseason feeling between late autumn and winter. Therefore there will be a bit of desaturated brown vegetation and a few patches of low grass still visible. Again here I used ForestPack and created Forest object for each type of grass I used to have more control. Moreover, I scattered some leaves on the ground to show, that leaves are still falling from trees and it is not winter time yet. (The scene does have quite a bit of Forest objects =))

Once I’ve done that, there was a bit of time spent on framing the view and layering some elements on the foreground. I like to do it manually, as opposed to Forest pack, as it gives you more control.

As for the lighting setup it is very simple and easy. The setup I’m using is a PG Dawn sky set to gamma 0.75 and linked with VRay Sun. Linking sun to HDRI has become incredibly fast once I’ve heard of the plugin Find and Bind by Nir Koshet Levi. I have also spent time on positioning the sun so that it doesn’t show in the reflection as a bright blob. But, that’s about it.

Stay tuned for more.

Here is my advanced, first I finished the modeling of the mass plane.
For my camera I positioned it to see the facade that I want illuminated.I also chose a wide format to be able to crop my image in post production.
For my light I decompose it into 4, first a hdri (visible to camera) to give a global color. Secondely i place my fstormSun.
i find that the impact of the sun on my scene , it is not satisfying so i add another light behind my scene to simulate a strong sun
And finally I add lights to the inside of my building with warm color
i crop my image for my final composition

I choose this camera mainly because it shows the most interesting part of the object, and introduced diagonals to lead the viewer into the scene..