Finally, I am able to say that I am done with this one. Took me a week to model, texture, and render everything. Had a blast creating some textures in Adobe Substance 3D and used some assets from Quixel to scatter on the ground. The trees in the foreground are from Botaniq, the background trees are 2D planes that I baked the Albedo and the Normal map of a tree (followed by a tutorial by CG Boost) and scattered them with the basic hair particles tool in Blender. I added a simple constraint so they follow the camera so they won't show on a weird angle.
It was also my first time trying out Gaea by QuadSpinner and I was able to create some convincing results in just a few clicks.
The whole scene was rendered as a single pass in Blender with Cycles.
The last photo is the original composition I followed, it was a screenshot from Season 2 of Rings of Power by Amazon
This will be one of my entries for the 2025 The Rookies competition.
A huge thanks to everyone at the M3DS Academy for helping me out at every step of