Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Not what I envisioned either.

I can tone down the crazy hues by just letting them pick up the vertex colours and that looks a bit more natural but I'm not sure if that kind of thing would work for the final image.

I did look on YouTube for feather tutorials but they're a bit complicated and the realistic ones seem to involve lots of hairs just for the detailed instance object, which sounds like something that would slow down my PC. An alternative is to have a soft transparent texture on a plane but my first attempt at that looked very ugly and colouring it seemed problematic.

I think I'll leave all that for now and start to experiment with a background. All my 3D efforts so far have had pretty sparse, unimaginative surroundings so I'd like that to change for this one.

Valence wrote:

I think I'll leave all that for now and start to experiment with a background. All my 3D efforts so far have had pretty sparse, unimaginative surroundings so I'd like that to change for this one.

 

This... is not working.

Tried again late last night but my landscape attempt is still not working.
I started off by using the TXA addon...

...which is pretty good but once it adds the textures it slows down by a substantial amount and that was just at a low resolution.
So I then decided to texture the mesh myself with a rock and grass mixture blended with a soft vertex colour mask and then scattered some particle trees in an attempt to follow this tutorial...


Of course, mine looked nothing like that.
It's really hard to get the different textures to look unified as if they belong together and as soon as you switch to realistic sky based lighting (whether using HDR or just the built-in Sky texture) the difference between Eevee and Cycles becomes glaringly obvious. The real time shaders just can't cope with it so I end up constantly in Cycles trying to tweak texture setting and then waiting 20 seconds for the screen to update before I know that those settings were wrong.

But on the plus side I did learn about that vertex colour masking trick AND I made a low poly tree using the skin modifier.