""It was said that if Man eats from the Tree of Knowledge, his faith would be sealed in death. Only the death wouldn't come from the Tree, or from the fruits it bears. It would come from Man itself, as the sweet taste of knowledge would start a hunger that can not be satisfied."

This piece is available on NFT Showroom as part of my collection Myths & Legends.

Myths & Legends: The Tree of Knowledge

You can find my entire gallery here

Process:

I was really feeling the Scandinavian vibe from the last piece I did, and decided to keep going with it. The misty mountain atmosphere is such a good exercise to play with, because of the volume/mist/fog!

I started by modeling the tree, created a particle system to create branches, then another one to create leaves. I applied both of them, and reduced the amount of faces they had with decimate to make it more light-weighted, and duplicated it a bunch of times around the top of the tree to create a thick dense layer of leaves.

For the colour of the leaves and shape, I was inspired by a tree i saw on a model website, it might have been Turbosquid or something. I joined all the leaves as one and create a randomization of colours going from bright red to autumn yellow, and tadaa!

After I was done modeling and texturing the tree, I started modeling the mountain side, texturing it as well,and introducing the background plane and light system. I added two characters from Mixamo, and moved their rig around to have the desired "walking up that hill" effect.

Then I built up the temple, textured its different parts, added emission shaders all around. Time for the volume!

The first render I did of that scene lasted 18h in cycles at 3000 samples. Once it was done, I noticed a lot of things I wanted to change and fell in despair. I would have to wait that long every time?

No! The second time, I added a bunch of fog pictures to the scene, and turned them transparent using a Transparent node, an emission node, a mix shader, and a colour invert node (I can tell you more about the trick if you want, took me a while to find the right blend so the plane wouldn'd also cast a shadow). Next render lasted a banging 6h with Cycles, still at 3000 samples! Oh joy, oy wonders, blessed be fog planes!

Overall, another super fun project to do, I might stick with that misty painty mysterious vibe for a while.

Thanks for supporting art on Hive/PeakD/NFT Showroom, you are all making our artists dreams come true!