Image 1 - A Raven contemplating the scene:

The background landscape was completely created in PD Artist. (or PD Howler, same tool). PD Artist can quickly create landscapes from elevation maps. It also adds erosion, sediment elevation and sediment coloring. It then adds lighting with raytraced cast shadows, and can render it too with ambient occlusion shading. There is also a module for adding clouds and fog. The clouds are prebuilt. In PD Howler you can create your own in the Particle Modeler (which is animated and hence a tool that is not included in PD Artist).

The grass near the bottom on the ground was painted with particle brushes (Optipustics presets for 'Baddy grass').

The trees to the left and right were painted with a single brush stroke each, using a particle preset from the 'Foliage' group.

Notice that the raven and branch it sits on were blurred. That part of the image was in a separate layer, and even though PD Artist didn't do automatic apha-blended opacity, using the raven layer in Multiply mode works well enough to make it appear opaque, since when you multiply black pixels to any others from layers below, they turn black.





Image 2 - Another Raven:

The raven and tree came from a photograph which we took in our neighborhood and turned into a black and white, then placed in a layer on top of the background image.

The bright glow and lensflares from the Sun in the upper left was also added in PD Artist.





Image 3: Yet another raven and landscape

Here's another example of a snowy landscape created with the 3D Designer filter, which starts from an elevation map to create renderings with erosion and sediments added by it. A slight blur for the foreground layer lets us focus on the beauty of the background scenery.





Image 4:

This image had several stages: background skies with clouds were hand painted. Then a mountain range that was created in 3D Designer was added. Then a lot of different rocks and foliage were added, painted in the mid and nearby front areas. Most of these are based on foliage brushes.





Image 5:  Another River Canyon

This is another example of using the 3D Designer to create a landscape with sediments and erosion. In this case, something like a canyon. It also shows the 3 basic color levels that are based on the elevation: Grass (green) at the lower levels, Rock (grey) in the middle elevations, and Snow (white) in the upper peaks. Additionally, the sediments can be left unaffected and pick their coloration based on height and slope like the rest of the terrain, or they can be forced to one of the three main colors. In this case, the sediments were matched to Snow, which adds patches of snowy sediments here and there in lower elevations too.

An image like this takes just a few seconds to create. Ok, perhaps a minute. With practice and experience ;-)

If you want to learn the tricks about how to use the 3D Designer filter for creating images similar to this, watch the tutorial series in the "River Canyon" playlist of our YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBqbdhU5umbfeOflrR0ukgjZe7kK1mOv0






Image 6:

Here's another example of a landscape that start with a rendered mountain that came from the 3D Designer filter.

There are various elements of bushes, grass and trees that were added below, and those are again based on brushes from the foliage brushes or general particle brushes.





Image 7: Mystic fog, monolithic blocks

This one was created with one of the earlier releases of the 3D Designer, which already had elevation fog but didn't have all lighting, shadow casting or erosion/sediment effects yet. It didn't need it.

The clouds were not rendered at the same time as the bottom part of the scene, but rather composited later. Interestinly, a lot of interesting cloudy skies like this can be created in 3D Designer too.





Image 8 - Lens flares

Project Dogwaffle has several presets for various types of glowing lights and lens flares.





Image 9 - Adding grass and foliage details nearby

This is the same image as the prior one above, but we've painted some grass and bushes or small trees nearby. Using the foliage and particle brushes, this can be done in mere seconds.




Image 10 - more landscape painting

Using a mix of various grass and foliage settings for bushes, tufts and trees.



Image 11: Big Moon

The Moon came from a photograph we took, and stamped in screen mode over the sky and clouds.

The landscape is of course created with the 3D Designer filter.

There is also a nice lens flare for the bright star.





Image 12 -

particle brushes for grass, foliage brushes for bushes and trees





Image 13

Another example of using particle and foliage brushes.





Image 14

The landscape was rendered in Puppy Ray, the ray tracer from PD ARtist and PD Howler. The sun was added in post, and so was the light rays / shadows from the mountains nearby (using Mystic vision filter in Dark vision mode).





Image 15

ANother rendering in 3D Designer, with added post for the lens flare





Image 16

The mountain was created in 3D Designer, the sky too but in a separate rendering, and the two were then composited together.





Image 17

The mystical side of Puppy Ray rendering.





Image 18

Painting with various brushes





Image 19

Bristle brushes






Image 20

The helms of grass in the forground use a new feature that changes the size of the brush along the path. t's a post processing repaint effect, using a size-control envelope.