The next step in creating the Barley Field scene was to set the camera in position and light the terrain with the mood lighting we were aiming for. We rendered this in Eevee because the transparent crop cards were very calculation-intensive in Cycles, and we just wanted to get a sense of the scene's mood.
We had initially planned to model a dead tree for the background, but in the end, we used a royalty-free poplar tree model that looked good.
We felt a bit weird about using royalty-free models because we tend to be perfectionists and like to model everything ourselves 100%. However, we've been told to "STOP reinventing the wheel" and that "It's better to save time and focus on storytelling and modeling things that don't exist, rather than wasting time on props you can find online for free." So, we're going to try to be less neurotic and follow that advice.
To light the land, we simply used an HDRI image we made called Ocean Dawn. The orange tint from the HDRI was exactly what we had in mind, so there was no need to spend time searching for other light sources.
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