Thank you! ❤️

I'm not the OP, but you don't want to fully create the entire scene and only then look for angles, because you'll just waste time building stuff that's gonna be either outside the view or really small. Also you might want to tweak some placements to improve the composition.

So, I'd assume, that they either had a (mostly) complete composition from the start or blocked out a scene with gray-boxes and then looked for angles, maybe tweaking some stuff

What an honour 🙏

Just a smoky hut where the locals look at you strangely

Thanks! Yeah it was rendered with Cycles with 4096 samples.

Had to use a looooot of samples on this one because the combination of dark areas, lots of volumetrics, subsurface scattering on snow, small light sources, etc made for a very noisy render which even the denoiser couldn't clean up that well 😅 usually I'd just do 128 or 256

I spent a very long time on the terrain textures, particularly getting the masking just right (for areas where snow has melted, patches of deeper snow, the path having very little, etc). I tried lots of different approaches but didn't like the effects or they looked weird.

And then lots of troubleshooting errors like weird speckling effects in the trees when rendering, trying to balance the sky contrast so you can still make out clouds when the sun is so blinding, odd displacement errors on the terrain causing weird shading.

I'm sure I could probably streamline my workflow a bit. The little tweaks always take ages for me. They probably don't have to, but I love trying things and often get lost in making changes that probably don't even matter that much 😂

Nah don't worry, they're warm and toasty inside. Fur-lined 🔥

Thanks! Blender is such a good piece of software. The fact it's FOSS is just mind-blowing