This is one of the Environments created for Quixel's 'Ninety Days' project, during which each individual artist in our team was tasked with completing as many different environment as possible, all in a timespan of 90 days.
Take a look at the complete "Ninety Days" release right here: https://youtu.be/ca2ME4Wy0eM
This scene became surprisingly tricky. I originally made it for the Black Alder Tree release. We had a pretty tight deadline on that and I wasn't quite satisfied with the result. Luckily I found time to give the scene another pass. I'm happy I manage to get a nice kind of texture to the lighting. I think the trick was to just add a lot of volumetric fog combined with animated fog cards. Also the color combination of the tree and lanterns vs the blue background is like the simplest color combination in the book. But its good to just keep things simple sometimes.
Everything for 'Ninety Days' was created using the Epic Games and Quixel Ecosystem, meaning we used Megascans, Metahumans, Sketchfab and the Epic Marketplace.
A massively heartfelt thankyou to the amazing people I get to work alongside with:
https://www.artstation.com/disting
https://www.artstation.com/sagadesign
https://www.artstation.com/alectucker
https://www.artstation.com/danwoje
https://www.artstation.com/jackm
https://www.artstation.com/corshmell
https://www.artstation.com/mattoztalay