Doodle 'o Mine

First, I wanna say that this is not a modelling tutorial, I assume you already know the basics of blender, I’ll just explain the setting for my low poly scenery illustration.

You can check this tutorial (not mine) if you need to know how to model low poly mountains 

http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/secrets-to-creating-low-poly-illustrations-in-blender–cg-31770

So, before opening blender I do a quick composition and colors sketch. The final colors are very different from the sketch, but I kept the composition.

In blender I modeled the mountains (each a separate object) and placed on the scene. I always check from the camera view (num0) to see if it looks good. I didn’t care if it was realistic in 3d. This is how it looks from above

Ugh ugly.

This is a render of the the scene without colors. The water is 3 layers on top of one another, the 2 on top being transparent.

And one with some test colors but without effects

I thought water needed some waves so I subdivided, triangulated and displaced some vertices. Geometry doesn’t look very neat, but looks better on render.

Rendering

I did the rendering in blender cycles. I assume you already have knowledge of blender cycles. The material top 2 layers of water was a mix of transparent, diffuse and glossy (reflection) shaders. Here are the nodes for the material

The atmospheric perspective was done by mixing the colors by hand (in a mix shader, the color of the mountain with the blue of the sky, only diffuse), because I only did it to the 2 objects in the background. But it can be done with mist or volume scatter if there’s a lot of objects.

The lighting is very simple, just a yellow-ish sun light (you can see it in the image of the scene from above)

I used Depth of Field with focus on the big mountain in the right, to make the background and foreground blurry.

I wanted a gradient sky, for that I added a plane in the back of the scene with this shader:

The clouds are just blurred quads

Here is the final result:

3D LowPoly of @nargyle​‘s character, Enna! I technically started this back in September, but kept putting it off. I got bit by the blender bug again, though, and decided to give it another shot! So.. less birthday, more Christmas? 0: