"Sandworld"

Crafting notes

• The model was shot first. This might have been a poor decision. Next time I'll craft first. I had a vague idea of what I wanted during the shoot, and set the lights up for that. While designing the scene I discovered that didn't actually match anymore, and I had to improvise a bit to make it match as close as possible.
• Take more time to do the cutout. I hate that part, as it is tedious and boring, but it's important.
• I've crafted the dunes out of a square with some subdivisions and the sculpting tools in Blender
• The crates and ship were predefined 3D assets from kitbash3d I couldn't not use or this.
• The sand layer bugged me the most. I think I re-rendered it 3 times with different settings -- with displacement, without, more and less pronounced normal shading etc -- and then mashed those together in photoshop.
• Final render took about an hour of rendering in Cycles at 6000x3000, 400samples, on GPU+CPU

Earlier iterations

And just for fun, here's some earlier visuals

Iteration 4

Iteration 4: one of the very first renders were everything came together. The model and ship are there, but there's no texturing on the ground yet. The box is for size.

Iteration 6

Iteration 6: Reshaped the sand dunes and randomly playing with their texture settings. I kinda liked this look, but it's not the visuals I intended to get. I drowned the box by accident.

Iteration 7 Iteration 7: much beteter! This is getting close to the look I was aiming for. It needs more details though!

Iteration 9

Iteration 9: close! The ground texture is much too pronounced in this version still... let's lessen that a bit!