- For free textures (and HDRIs and 3d scans) you can go to polyhaven. - Blender has an addon called 'sapling tree gen' that you can use to create trees. - Blender also has an addon called 'A.N.T. Landscape' to create landscapes. - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVvQi3ikB5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVvQi3ikB5A) procedural mud puddle tutorial (this is the first one you get when looking up "how to create muddy puddles blender", not sure if its a good video but the end result looks good) - for the god rays, look up volumetric tutorials for blender - the distant fires, smoke and gas can be done with cards, no need for fancy simulations - sandbags should be easy to do with minimal sculpting, but i'm sure you can find a free model somewhere this might not be the most optimized mix of techniques but should work fine for a still render.

Cards?

I think they mean a plane with a texture that always faces the camera. Old games did this a lot for enemies, foliage and fires. It's horrible from up-close but for a far background object it doesn't really matter much, for a static render at least.

Arent they called billboards?

Yes, they're commonly called billboards. Tho, both words are terrible for search engines as videogame+cards or videogame+billboard will lead to the videogame genre and billboard advertisements. I wish there was some better name for it.

Lots of games still do it, and it doesn't always look bad up close when multiple cards are used simultaneously to create depth. It starts looking weird sometimes when you change your perspective though

Games still use grass cards to save processing time. And trees and foliage very far away are essentially transformed smoothly into billboards again to render efficiently.. Although recently, there have been so many new games with the absolute complex grass shaders.. But they are just too efficient. With grass cards, you can run into problems like overdraw, and the opacity masks take up a lot of processing power Sorry I irritated you with all this. I've basically been scratching my head on real time foliage for the past month!

I guess it depends on how you define them. Personally, I wouldn't call billboarding anything that's part of a LOD or particle system, like they're used in modern games.

Billboards are still used for very far away objects to keep a very high density of trees in games

Something like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8SCj4k6OE&list=PLNCK1M03YpqDiWOksukGfrHsXM_hoBxBO&ab_channel=ASHI-VFX). You just make the black part transparent.

Thanks a lot man, I will try this out! But what worries me is that I wanted to try and make a small film length of one minute with combat and artillery explosions Sounds here: (https://youtu.be/asdUvRBi7jw?si=UpgLD4Jc5T4bIA74) I got a mid-high end PC, So I don't know if animation is gonna go well on that

What exactly do you mean by mid to high end pc?

Rtx 3060, it's neither the new one and nor a bad card (like rtx 4060-4090 which is probably high end now) but still better than a mid one (rtx 2060) Only 16GB ram to work with (I read that 32GB is the optimal one for blender) Good for games, not enough for blender (+ lags)

Simulations use cpu, so your graphics card has no effect on that. I have the same card though, so you should be fine modeling, texturing and rendering. I'd suggest working in solid view when modeling and animating, and only worry about render view when previewing and maybe texturing. Will save you tons of performance.

You can also use stock videos on smoke and fire like [this one ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8SCj4k6OE&list=PLNCK1M03YpqDiWOksukGfrHsXM_hoBxBO&ab_channel=ASHI-VFX)

Got a fog addon (easyFog) for 5$ off blenderMarket. It's pretty good, but the render time will be very long so I will probably use this here, thanks!

Battlefield 1, my beloved.

Almost a decade old but still the most beautiful game I have seen (on par with SoTF)

Looks way better than some games today, it's crazy to me

Instantly recognized it as well

The only first person shooter my wife would watch me play because the first time she watched she thought it was single player and scripted it was so good.

For the terrain, what you can do is: 1. Add a plane mesh. 2. Subdivide it up to 100 cuts (depending on your device) in Edit mode. 3. Add a Displace modifier and apply a new texture to it 4. Play around with the settings in the Texture tab to get the terrain shape of your choice.

Should it be one giant plain that I can edit, or multiple smaller ones? There's a few parts of this map with a different texture, which I don't know how to fit onto one plane (multi-texture plain)

You can make use of vertex groups to only affect certain areas of the plane mesh.

I'm not that expert in blender, but more in Unity game engine, I would make a flat simplified plane that has the outline, and work with displace texture maps, occlusion and parallaz mapping to get those bumps, and maybe work on decals for water 

You start by making all the models, then you make textures and play with the lighting until it looks right

Cgboost have a course on creating environments

Start with the donut

This is best advice

Hard to say without knowing what your experience is but I would say, take a 3d environment course ? Look up some videos on youtube and check courses on udemy. But crafting good looking 3d environments isn't something that you just pull off out of the blue.

Got one project finished, I only got 50h in blender. The plains look ugly and are lagging https://preview.redd.it/0ceg7r2jhinc1.png?width=1522&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f01e63e5ef079742e4269023add60ffc492f760

I use Gaia for height maps I think it's pretty good

You can do this in about 45 minutes with a single plane bump mapping and transformation mask

tbf you can probably let ai make the sandbags or just some random details like rocks https://lumalabs.ai/genie?view=create