The Realm of Middle Earth

Lord of the Rings fanart - a 3D recreation of Tolkien's Middle earth.

I had the idea a few days ago and had to give it a try. I used an existing 2D map and extracted masks for rivers, land, ocean and mountains, before taking this to Gaea to model the terrain in 3D and to make a bunch of masks for texturing. Lots of layered shading in redshift to get the desired look, added some cloud gobo light blockers, 3D volume clouds, and then spent a while designing and positioning the text overlays.