Plan
This was one of the scenes what weren’t in the pre-vis. I wanted to include more nature shots and thought a river scene would be nice. I thought it would emphasise the impact of litter in the environment.
I found this tutorial on creating a river that helped me a lot with this scene and all the subsequent scenes.
Modelling
I started off with a plane that was subdivided loads. I used Proportional Editing to make the bank of the river. Then used just a simple plane underneath this one. The simple plane will act as the water.
I then modelled a few varieties of rocks using the landscape addon. I used the geometry nodes to instance the points on the plane. This helped the scene not be so heavy than if I used a particle system. This distributed the stones on the plane. I added some bigger rocks to the scene and then placed them on the river part. To add to the texture, I downloaded a rocky texture from Ambient CG. I used the UV map to add a Displacement map using the Displace modifier. I then played around with the colours and make it more pinky to match the aesthetic of the project.
I then added a texture to the water plane and noise texture. When I changed the W value of the noise texture node it makes it look like water moving.
I then added a noise animation to the Can and animated it going down the river.
Rust
I thought by this scene the can should look rusty. I found a tutorial on how to make procedural textures. I used several noise textures and a second Principled BSDF node to mix it with the metal label texture I already had on the can.
Shader editor below showing the rust texture.
Pines
I wanted there to be a connection between this scene and the next one which is the forest scene. So I added trees to the scene. Instead of adding actual models of trees to the scene, I added planes with the images of trees. My computer was getting so slow at this point so I wanted to do something to free up space.
I had a separate Blender doc with a model of a tree and rendered a couple different images from each tree. One ordinary render and one that was a normal, to create a normal map. I used the orthographic camera instead of the perspective.
I then had took the images to place them in to the river doc. The normal map helped with the depth of the image, to make it look more 3D.
I then overlaid the planes together in the shader editor. I placed them in the scene around the river bank to look like the river was surrounded by a forest.
Lastly, I wanted to add plants to the scene. I tried to use the GScatter addon but it made my computer very slow and crash. So I ended up downloading a plant set from Quixel Bridge. Then I used the geometry nodes to distribute the plants. I then used an empty with a Noise animation on it, and then used the empty as an origin on the Simple Deformer. This made the plants move.
Final Thoughts and renders
I was really happy with this render. It took a while again because it looked really weird in renderfarm so had to convert it to an older version of Blender. But after that it was quite smooth after that. I played around with the lighting a few times but happy with what it looked like in the end. Would have have loved to have water drops on the can but that can’t be render on render farm as the drop addon I have is only compatible with Blender 3.5!