The Tree - Level Art, Lightning and Modeling

This is another personal project of mine. This time, I decided to use AI (Midjourney) to find an inspiration and play with different compositions and ideas for the background. My goal was to create a scene with a central composition of a tree and an interesting perspective, without copying art from a reference.

Once I found a nice reference, I started creating the tree in Speedtree. I played with the form of the trunk and added a few different forces for the branches. For the leaves, I selected Megascans texture and cut it out from the texture atlas. As for the bark, I used a standard texture from Speedtree.

To achieve the same misty atmosphere as the reference, I created a fog material using this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL6aMamsc7E Additionally, I selected several rocks from Megascans and constructed a naturalistic environment. To create a more layered effect for the fog, I added a few layers. Finally, I added some fake lighting to highlight ravens and enhance the depth of the scene.