Getting Back into the Swing of Things

The latest render during research and development into a better optimized fully CGI forest scene that doesn't require massive render times or sacrifices for render speed. This render took less than 2 minutes despite the enormous amount of polygons, not only on screen, but in the scene as a whole.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been fully immersed in a demanding new role, which left little room for personal creative work. Now that I’ve settled into a balanced routine, I’m thrilled to dive back into my 3D full-CGI development with my friend and business partner. Below, I’ll share a bit about my absence, introduce the featured Blender forest scene I rendered entirely on my own, and thank everyone who checked my site during this hiatus. Recently, I committed to carving out evenings and weekend blocks to return to Blender and CGI work. I’m especially excited to continue collaborating on a 3D full-CGI venture for a friend and business partner, where we’ll merge our skills to create a streamlined entertainment content workflow that will hopefully be implemented in the coming weeks or months. Attached is a stylized yet realistic full-forest scene I built in Blender for the project, showcasing my latest experiments in Unreal Engine to Blender pipelines, particle-based tree placement using geometry nodes, and volumetric lighting. This scene is basic but it works and it renders in under 2 minutes per frame at 1080p so fully rendered videos are more than possible in this enviroment. Geometry nodes can be programed for Camera Culling, allowing for millions of blades of grass and leaves to be present in the scene but only matter if the camera can see them, cutting down on render time and greatly improving on efficiency compared to the typical forest scene workflow in full CGI of smaller environments or lower resolution particles. Thank you to everyone who stopped by my website during my absence; your visits and messages have meant a great deal! I’m looking forward to sharing further updates, breakdowns, and new posts in the very near future as I fully return to my passion projects.