Seaside Terrace

This was a portfolio project I was working on for a long time live on stream at www.twitch.tv/shanny947 !
I originally started it as a way to learn a little more about water simulation and cloth/sewing simulation inside of Blender. While I learned a lot about both of these 3D art methods, I also learned that the nature of simulation, is that it never really seems to come out exactly how you want it to. There is a random nature to it that can make it feel like a little bit off from how you imagined it. I definitely spent too much time, tweaking settings and re-baking simulations to try and get it just right. I eventually put the project down for a bit, and when I came back to it, decided to change my goals for it and finally let it be finished.
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Despite the places where I feel I fell short, I managed to learn a ton through this project. I learned how to use a terrain import add-on for Blender that allowed me to bring in the real location data of where this image was taken. I learned how sewing for fabric simulation in Blender works, including a lot of its quirks and work-arounds. I learned a lot about Blender's water simulation, most importantly, that it should only be used to smaller scale splashes of water, and not large swaths of ocean! Through my struggles with the water simulation, I learned about using Blender's ocean modifier as a system for creating quite a beautiful randomized ocean shader. I also learned a bit more about skyboxes and hdri setups, particularly that it's hard to perfectly recreate and line up a specific section of sky. It's often better to just try to put together a skybox that is similar, and gives the pieces the correct artistic feel and lighting, rather than being as accurate to an image as possible.
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At the end of the day, I feel that this portfolio project not only yielded a beautiful final render image, but also taught me a valuable lesson about finding beauty and knowledge in failure. I am certainly very proud of the models and materials that I created for the foreground of the image. In the future, I will be sure to not only focus on learning important new 3D skills, but also learning to better balance my desire for artistic detail/perfection with a better time efficiency for my portfolio projects!
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The image I was trying to recreate can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MostBeautiful/comments/p0r7gv/positano_and_the_amalfi_coast_seen_from_a_shaded/