Amador County

Viewport Render

Clay Render

An environment study of the forests up in Eldorado National Forest, California - an area a bit South of Lake Tahoe. My uncle lives up there, and I have lots of memories of hanging out beneath trees just like these ones!

This project was completed over the course of about a week and a half - I started with lots of quick, sketchy modeling and layout in order to give myself more time later for lighting and rendering.

This worked well with the style I was going for: more exaggerated shape design with grounded lighting and texture work

Created almost entirely in Blender - I took some of the tree assets into Substance Painter for a bit of texture paint and to extract ambient occlusion and curvature maps. I ended up using a variety of rough, messy particle systems for the pine needles, bark, and moss.

I did lots of forest research to get the trees right - represented here are mostly incense cedars and ponderosa pines. The gentleman with the flaky bark is a pacific madrone, which are very pretty. They’re also called refrigerator trees, because their smooth inner layer of bark often feels cool to the touch!

Inspirations and References on my Pureref board