Design beautiful outdoor scenes
Mohsen Hashemi details his efficient workflow process for the creation of this photorealistic environment
Mohsen Hashemi details how to create a realistic environment
This render, inspired by Hrensko National Park in Czech Republic, was for me the next step to further my skills at producing 3D visualisations, and a great challenge on how to use tools more efficiently for archviz scenes. Although this project may seem like a very complex one, I will demonstrate just how easy we can create such a realistic result if we simply follow the right workflow process.
Special thanks to Wim Vanderschueren for help with this project.
01 MODEL THE ENVIRONMENT
This is often a challenging step, but I’d advise you to just think about what you need, and don’t exaggerate the process. In this project I modelled only the environment that was visible to the camera. I basically started with a simple plan, divided it into mid-range segments and made my basic environment with push and pull in 3ds Max. It may take time, but it’s the best and most optimised way of creating a terrain.
02 DISPLACEMENTS AND TEXTURES
As we made the basic terrain by push and pull, we may need to create more variety on surfaces with displacement to improve the realism. So, for this purpose, I started to make a simple ground texture with Quixel Mixer. As I guessed that most of the ground would be covered by ferns and bushes, I didn’t spend a huge amount of time making the texture, because I mainly needed the displacement. For the rocks close to the camera I used Megascans 3D rock models with high-res displacements to create a more natural, realistic look.
03 SCATTERING LIBRARY
We are now aiming to make our mountain-jungle environment look even more photoreal. I divided the environments with different colours, with each colour representing different species of plantlife. For greater variation, I made two types of scattering for some parts, using different settings for a more natural appearance.
For a very realistic environment you may need a variety of different species, and that was what I brought into my scene. As the distance of the environment ends at around 400 metres from the camera, all the details of the trees and ferns would be visible. So, I chose all species in highquality format to ensure there will be no lack of texture in the final render. Then I gathered all the models together, deleted some of the leaves, and changed a few of the materials according to my preferences and desired look.
04 FOREST PACK LAYERS
Utilising different layers always helps to achieve better results. Using Forest Pack, and based on the colour that I assigned for each part of the environment, I assigned a layer for each species, and chose a different scale, rotation and density for each layer. For each layer I also randomised the probabilities of each species, for even greater variety.
I excluded or included more random spaces for scattering and disabled any unnecessary parts of the surface from scattering. Make sure you also exclude different objects such as trunks or rocks from scattering layers.
05 MANUAL PAINT
With all the layers you made using Forest Pack, there are still some parts that need manual scattering and you also need to scatter some ferns or stones in the places you like; for this I chose Advanced Painter, which is a very useful and user-friendly tool. Plus, because of the objects’ formats, sometimes Forest may not recognise the right direction to scatter on x, y, z position, so Advanced Painter helps to have more accuracy for scattering. When you’ve performed a couple of tests and made sure that all the species are placed nicely, we can now go to the next step.
06 MATERIALS
Never trust an object's material and always do some tests before the final renders, especially for objects exported from other engines like Unreal. Tweak the
gamma for the textures and also the brightness for clearer details. The more variety you bring into the materials and texture, the more photorealistic results you can achieve. Go for different layers if it’s necessary and always choose a TIFF format rather than HDR for the displacement if you don’t have a strong computer.
07 ATMOSPHERIC EFFECT
I always like to create an artistic atmosphere and mostly follow the real world as my reference for this. The amount of fog or mist you add to your render can play a vital role in the refraction of light. Adding fog used to be an entire post-production technique, but now it just takes the use of a simple material for the entire environment. As you can see in the final image and in the moonlit example (above), the amount of fog brought a mass of light around the light source and brightened a specific area. In the screenshot you can also see the volumetric fog setting I used for this scene.
08 LIGHTING
I'm very meticulous about this part. It was the most timeconsuming part of this project, as I tried more than 30 HDRI textures with different rotation settings, in both vertical and horizontal directions. Positioning the lighting is a very important step that must not be overlooked, so make sure to spend some time tweaking and perfecting the lighting. •