Tower of Magi

This one really started out as a more technical thing, making a road that held up better under multiple angles so I could use it in an animation with a moving camera.

I wanted to do an animation where the vehicle I used the second vehicle I made, but did not use in the post: https://niklaswerth.com/a-long-road/

Here's a very early test road animation, before I drastically improved the road, and changed literally like, everything about the scene, and the environment, and made it a still image.

In the end, the new island version, would actually work a lot better in an animation, as I fixed all the seam issues I was having in that test animation. In the test animation version, I'm just pasting my little heightmap road, and trying to blend squares of it together. It might not be super noticeable in that test animation, with the motion blur and all. but you can probably really tell in this viewport preview.

When I added the ball, and animated it with a curve, I was like, "oh, dummy, you should be using an array and a curve modifier to set up this road!"
So here's the road in the island version of the scene done with that method.

Its kind of really really obvious, but I just hadn't done it before.
This gave me much better control of the road, and got rid of all the pesky seams.
I added grass because grass is pretty, and then water and then, you know, this and that and the other, and thats how we got the final scene in the featured image.