Penjing is the Chinese term for a miniature landscape composed of living moss representing grass, rocks representing cliffs and trees as themselves which create forests. These days the more common “Bonsai” trees are often a single tree in a pot; it is little known that entire landscapes were created before single trees became popular, and that they evolved in China first, then brought to Japan by Buddhist monks during their invasion ( I guess good CAN come from bad )

This is my entry to dr-druids second 3D landscaping contest. Unlike the first time around, where anything goes. This one has the theme “scale” which means the scene has to depict something very big or very small. Though I have a concept for a massive scene as well, I thought that the small landscape would have been better to do first as it would probably be the least common choice for landscapes ( which are big after all ). So I thought this cleverly depicts an otherwise big scene in a small way…which is the original intention of all real bonsai displays anyway.
The working progress started off by modelling the pot, temple and bridges in Cinema 4D and the rocks were created using Vue’s special, yet under used Boolean technology that can also be used on Terrains and the result were some very fine-looking rocks. Personals SolidGrowth trees were used but moving them around is where the problem started. My laptop slowed to a grinding halt by the time more than two trees were in there…each move I made to place a tree right ended up making me wait 5 minutes for each window to catch up, arranging each tree needlessly took an hour ( times that by the number of trees and that’s half of the time just spent on that ). I dreaded how long the rendering would be, but amazingly, it took just under 2 hours…I have no idea why my laptop was lagging so much on a scene simple enough to render in a short time.

Long comment…as usual, thanks to those who read !