Why? Well AO falls into the deep cracks of rocks and thick moss, but you see less and less into these parts as they face away from you because they are occluded by the surrounding ridges. It’s like cheap Parallax Occlusion. This combined with the “Fuzzy Shading” node for the Diffuse has made some great results!

As for the ice, it has a very nice subsurface glow in the concept and I went as far as I could to replicate it using just my light and the subsurface shader, but ultimately it needed some nudging to get that nice blue glow. My solution was to manually vertex paint in a blue emissive color, using Ambient Occlusion to mask out the crevices. I use this conservatively on thinner bits of ice where light would bounce through. You can see this in the “Detail Lighting” image I’ve shared at the end.

Realistic and Stylized Look

The balance of stylized and realistic aspects in the concept art is one of the reasons I was drawn to it so much. It has a painted feel, but very explicit detail in some areas. So from the beginning I’ve been struggling with this and figuring out how to hit that sweet spot. I think the best way to describe the approach is that I try to keep the materials as true to life as possible (in terms of their PBR values) and let the style come out in how I simplify the primary and secondary forms. Once I get down to the little details I revert back to a more realistic feel. It has impact at a distance, and interest up close. I think as realistic materials become more abundant it’s gunna be more important than ever for us to create interesting styles, moods, and compositions.

Lighting

The lighting is actually very simple. From the concept I could tell the light was limited to one large beam coming in at an angle through some clouds, or maybe a cave opening? It’s almost like a spotlight, but I needed parallel sun-like rays. So my compromise was to use a simple directional light, but place the scene in a bubble with a gap in it. So there’s this interaction of light that gives a sense of a world beyond the frame. I make that one light go as far as possible by tweaking the angle, intensity, and temperature for hours. Beyond that, there’s a point-light that concentrates some warmth at the center of focus by the cave opening and a tiny touch of HDR environment lighting that really brings out the detail in the ice. Finally there’s a touch of LUT table color grading to push the darks, and make the colors pop a bit.