Creation process of my FotS submission

This is explaining the process of the creation of my 2024 FotS art contest submission in a separate post because it makes me feel official. (sorry for the images being ginormous, I dunno how to fix it)

so, I began by creating a skin, and some armor,

Than I created a budget version of the Arcanist's Tome

As well as my own depiction of the Plague Staff, because I had it at the time on my, as of now, only class, which is, of course, an Arcanist.

I created one tree,

And another two which I didn't really get any pictures of,
Than I imported the player model into Blender, and got it all rigged up.

Experimented with Volume until I got some good fog.

Started to create a landscape.

Hand placed every leaf block on the trees (which I sadly have no screenshots of) until I remembered Geometry Nodes exist, and figured that out.
I placed Ico-Spheres where I wanted the leaves to go, and used this Geo-Nodes setup to turn them into volume, distribute points in the volume, and place the leaf instance, with randomized rotation, on every point.

The leaf instance:

Made this big forest, just for the final render to barely show any of it.

And did a lot of test renders.
Here's a Viewport render before I put any grass or rocks:

Here's the one right after I did a little angle change, and added grass and rocks:

And then in the last one, I changed the placement of some grass and rocks, which I legit spent, like, two hours thinking about, doubled the saturation of the ghost's emission, and added subsurface scattering to the Arcanist's hat.



Well, there's the process explained, except for the ghost, which was just a simple cube with a texture imported into Blender and given both Sub-Surface Scattering and Emission.

It was a joy making this, even though I was shown what being inexperienced (and I mean this is the first time I've done anything like this ever) can do. Making mistakes means I'll learn, and I'll do better next time.

If you read that whole thing, congrats, even I got bored writing it, and if you're here, thank you for existing. Seriously, just being able to post here and have people see my stuff is more than I could ask for. It's like why I play Raids, I do it for fun, if I get the Arcanist's Aspect of Total Obliteration (Salted please) then that's just a plus.

Welp, I'll probably make more renders, contest or not, because I love doing it, so see ya later, peace.

(If there's any mistakes, my bad, but I spent so long making this post and experiencing issues making it that I don't even care anymore)

 

holy cool!!

 

oooo very nice!