Behind the Scenes: Short Film Pan Si – Background Environment

Explore how Tianyi Zhu crafted the captivating background for her short film Pan Si, from sculpting terrain to scattering plants, using Blender to bring the scene to life.

INTRODUCTION

My name is Tianyi Zhu, a CG freelancer from China.

I started working in architectural visualization in 2002 and have received several industry awards, including:

First Place in the 2005 Architectural Visualization Competition (Organizer: CG Architect)
Best Animation in the 2007 Architectural 3D Awards (Organizer: CG Architect)

My 3D works have been featured in many industry magazines, such as 3D World, CG World, CADesigner, and Autodesk Architectural Visualization.

I have been self-studying Blender by watching YouTube and Bilibili since the end of 2022.

INSPIRATION

This project was inspired by photographs of Kanas Lake.

I am currently working on a short film, and this scene serves as its background environment. Some interesting events will take place here.

PROCESS

Tools Used

Hardware:

Processor: Intel® Xeon® E5-2687W (2 processors) @ 3.10GHz
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro K5000 + NVIDIA Tesla K20c
Memory: 32GB RAM

Software:

Blender
Photoshop

Workflow

The entire 3D work was created in Blender. First, I painted the displacement map for the ground in Photoshop and used the Displace Modifier in Blender to generate the center ground.

Next, I created several low-poly mountains around the center ground for placing the plants.

I then painted the base color map, roughness map, and normal map and applied them to the shader. This completed the center ground. To achieve a rich and varied water surface, I incorporated complex surface bumps.

Test renders:

Next, I created plant assets. I used the Blender add-on Sampling Tree to make two types of trees: fir and aspen.

The shrubs were also generated using Sampling Tree, but I recombined their branches and leaves to form several groups of shrubs with different densities.

The small grass models were the simplest, while the small stone models came from Poly Haven.

I then used Blender's particle system to scatter these plants on the ground.

Finally, I added water plants—also created using displacement—to enhance the scene’s details.

There was no artificial lighting used in the scene, only HDRI environment lighting. The final rendering was done in Cycles. A slight contrast adjustment was made in Photoshop.