The scene was built off of the great fir and pine forest course by Rob Tuytel. I followed along with some of the video material, but also spent a lot of time making my own changes to most things once I felt comfortable enough to approach it alone. Everything including rendering was done on my main computer: this project became so big in scope I had to upgrade my physical memory to be able to render and composite the final parts.

Part 4: full scene

A fully rendered still of the final scene, composited, edited and colour graded using Affinity Photo 

The viewport and colour versions of the same still

First full render test

Unique geometry view of the proxies, used for optimisation

Rigged tree models

User-facing modifier and object placement node tree

Main node tree and birds-eye view of the scene. Red indicates the lower-quality LOD objects

Part 3: river and paths

A fully rendered still of the river system, composited, edited and colour graded using Affinity Photo 

River material test

Animated river geometry node tree

UV/Combined noise texture view

Water material node tree

Riverbed material displacement test

Path material tweaks with new transition and edge grass

Inital path implementation

Part 2: tweaks

A fully rendered close-up of the ground system with all layers, composited, edited and colour graded using Affinity Photo

Built-in compositing and lighting changes

Wireframe view of optimised photoscanned objects

Part 1: basics

A fully rendered still of the early ground system, composited, edited and colour graded using Affinity Photo

Placement and variety tweaks

Added pre-placed tree meshes

First foliage layers

Rocks and sticks

Starting point - base material with complex displacement