"Paradise at 30,000 ft" render breakdown tutorial (Patreon)

Hey, friends! I can't give out the project file for this one since I use assets from the Polygoniq team and Scatter that are paid (you can get their awesome addons here: https://blendermarket.com/creators/polygoniq?ref=580 and https://blendermarket.com/creators/bd3d-store?ref=580). For this render, I used an awesome plane model from the Polygoniq "Traffiq" addon (see below)

The interior of the plane initially came with a bunch of seats that filled up the main cabin. I wanted to add in one of my classic dreamy jungle-esque spaces, so I removed these seats out and added in a ground plane.

I added some subdivisions to a simple plane that filled the cabin, and then used the sculpt tool to add some bumpiness to it as if the soil/mud had been collecting up along the sides of the plane for a while. You'll notice some rocks scattered along inside the plane as well - these are a mix of photoscanned assets from Quixel Megascans that give me a little more dimension to the piece and help fill out the rest of the plane. 

To really frame up my scenes - I often like to add plants around the frame of the camera to draw the viewer's eye in to the piece. For this one, I wanted to have some tropical plants framing up 3/4 of the composition to draw your eye toward the view out the plane's windows. 

You can see the eye is pulled in naturally towards the window view. 

If I disable the plants for a second and switch over to rendered view (with optix denoiser enabled in the viewport for Cycles), you can see me beginning to play around with lighting design and texturing. I've added a sandy texture with some displacement to the surface and made it blend in more with the rocks. I've also started to experiment around a bit more with a new release of the Physical Starlight and Atmosphere add-on for the sky (https://blendermarket.com/creators/physical-addons?ref=580) which has an awesome option to start experiment with procedural clouds - that's right, PROCEDURAL CLOUDS!!

If I snap out of camera view for a moment, you can see the beauty of this add-on first hand. With the add-on, I have complete control of the atmospheric conditions and am able to change and adjust the clouds with just a few simple clicks. I've opted for a hazy, sunrise-look to this piece, but the add-on truly has infinite possibilities for different sky conditions. 

I typically start with the "Earth" preset and dial in my atmospheric conditions accordingly; however, there are also a few other neat preset conditions, like vaporwave, nishita, and Mars! You can also enable a binary sun setup if you were looking to recreate a Tattooine scene ;) 

For the last step, I used the wonderful Scatter add-on to place a bunch of different plant assets around my scene. I typically use masks to paint in exactly where I want my plants to be in order to control their scene distribution. You can also enable camera clipping as a mask to prevent plants from being scattered outside the FOV of your camera. This just saves memory and prevents you from wasting particles in a place you won't even see when you actually render out. 

Here are the render settings for this piece - I have been experimenting with both OptiX and OpenImageDenoise recently, and have been liking the detail I retain a bit more with OpenImageDenoise over OptiX. It's just a matter of personal preference though... I also render with the GPU for this one, so I have a larger tile size to speed up my renders. This one took just a couple of minutes to cook out on my NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000. 

Here's the final image with a bit of subtle post-processing in Photoshop! 

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of one of my recent favorites :) I've been exploring new ways to share behind the scenes tips and tricks with you since I'm often unable to share files like this with heavy use of paid add-ons. Let me know what you think of this style of breakdown! If this is something you all enjoy, I'll definitely make more of them for upcoming pieces. Cheers! 

-James