Heya!!

Here is an 8 image summary from start to finish on this project:
Right after modeling, this was the first look (obviously, this was pre-unwrapping)

Post unwrapping and finishing of the basic bricks, I added some dust. This dust was later edited and became close to invisible.

Of course, what ruin would be complete without run-off stains and muddy bases and so on? None. This was even after displacement was added (and before I knew of the texture bug in Cycles).

The ivies have finally been added! Here it had no texture or material. It was just a set of clay ivies over the completed ruin. You could see this as the starting point in doing the scene. In this case, the ivies as generated were far too much for my PC to handle, so it needed some adjustment (included in the book on how to do it quickly).

And here the ivy is completed. I really like the three pointed leaf design and it worked really well in the scene, but I did hit a snag on this one. Since Cycles' unwraps may differ from that of Blender Render, I was hoping that the initial leaf construction would be the right way up, lol, not so. It was upside down, so I had to modify every unwrap of the ivies, lol. Thankfully I was shown how to do it quickly and efficiently! I made sure that it is directed the right way up in the book.
Thank YOU!!!

This is what you get in the Viewport (or on personal preference, 3DView) with everything so far added and that includes the ivies' branches.

What a proud moment this was, lol. I was trying to build a scene around the ruin (had a clear idea of what I wanted it to be from the start) and so worked towards that (planning first people, not second). This however, was not even close, hahaha. It initially started with me wanting to make trees using only procedural textures, but I found that the actual trees take up less memory and look better, so I went with the Tree Generator instead textured with procedural textures (here it was pretty much only a test render).

Another test render (in this case you can see it was one of those times where the bug kicked in and didn't render the ruin itself right). I wanted some dirt in here, since I saw that there was quite a bit of dirt in and around some ruins (always get some reference), but in this case it just looked horrible, so there that one went. Then I tried adding grass, but as you can see, my PC was too slow to add the 1,000,000 minimum I needed for the look I wanted, so they went too. There was just really soooooooo much wrong with this render, I actually had a list of things I wanted to do it. That list was preceded with another list with the test render.

And after going through the list and adding whatever was needed, this was the result:


With a face count of over 1.2mil this is still a low poly scene, imo (too little detail in the trees for example). It could have been even more low poly (considering the light set-up), but I am extremely happy with how it turned out. Hope you are too!

Thank you very much to Andrew Price for his amazing tutorials (learned a few tricks that were absolutely essential to being able to do this) and JESUS for all the help and suggestions as well as wisdom on how to use what was there instead of moaning about what wasn't there. YOU rock!!!!

Everything in the above scene is textured with procedural textures. The only thing that is not procedural, and is at the same time, is the depth map (made with the Z Pass, so it's still generated) used to make the mistiness, but everything else, is completely, totally and only procedural.

Original rendered in FullHD, 50 passes and took around 3-5 hours to complete.

Thank YOU!!!!!!