Creating Fairy Tale Tree Scene in Blender

This scene was created entirely with botaniq Tree Library and Evermotion Vegetation Pack vol. 1 - our latest library of trees for Blender. Botaniq is the plugin that streamlines the process of scattering trees, grass, weeds and rocks (among other things, you also can scatter leaves, for example). 

It is extremely easy and fun to use and creating the scene like this is possible in the matter of minutes. 

The scene in Blender viewport. It consists of our hero asset, lighting and three planes with scattered greenery.

Hero asset was made pretty simple - there is a sphere, a tree from Evermotion Vegetarton Pack vol. 1 and a particle system for firefliy-like lights floating around the tree.

Hero asset and its thumbnail in botaniq library.

A sphere - in botaniq you can turn off displaying of assets if you want to inspect base sphere or gain some framerate.

All scattered elements are now visible. They are just created with one cliick, no tweaking here, except density.

I created a cylinder to emit particles. Cylinder itself is hidden from render and visible only in viewport. Particle settings are simple - the most important setting here is disabled gravity, because we want our particles to float freely around a tree.

Viewport - rendered view. Even if you turn off visibility of emitter in render, it will still be visible in rendered mode of viewport.

Environment - lake surface, lake bottom and forest hill. Yep, it takes a bit of imagination to see it from this angle, but from camera view it looks good. Never work harder than it is required to achieve your goal.

I scattered trees using Blender particle system. I used hair mode.

Bottom of the lake is just a plane with grass from botaniq scattered on it.

Botaniq lets you also to create water environments. It's a simple plane and lilypads and rocks scattered on it. We painted lilypads density using botaniq interface. Botaniq automatically assigned water shader to a plane.

...and this water shader is quite sophisticated and highly tweakable.

The finish touch - volumetric effects. I created three shapes that should act as a volumes and used new Blender feature - convert mesh to volume. To do that you need to press CTRL-A, create new empty volume and then in modifier section, choose "mesh to volume" and select your mesh. And it's ready. Almost. You need only to assign volume material at the end and tweak valuse to taste.

Volumes in viewport.

Sphere volumetric effect that is used to simulate a fog that rises from the grass.

The fog adds to the blueish effect and makes this scene a bit more magical.

As a light source I used sun lamp that is rotated to act as a rimlight, enhancing trees and hero asset silhouettes.

As an additional light I used HDRI map from HDRI haven, it is barely on, strength set to 0.1.

I enabled depth of field in camera to make a hero asset more prominent and separate it from the background.

There are tow tasks that are accomplished in compositor: denoising and adding glare effect to the lights.

To export I used Open EXR format and Filmic Log mode, so I could easier color grade this image later.

The final image.

Thanks for reading! :)