Lake Beach: Chicago

This is a little beach scene I decided to make based on a beach near my apartment. It’s one of many beaches bordering Lake Michigan, and I personally find their more enclosed nature to be very charming.

For this scene, I used a lot of collection instancing, where basically you put objects in a collection, hide the collection, and then create a new instance collection of that collection. This is a method I learned from this video, and it’s incredibly powerful for improving performance while adding a truly staggering amount of geometry. Instancing is genuinely amazing, and is the backbone of good environment art. Also be mindful that this was made with Cycles in mind, and is not optimized for EEVEE.

Final sizes:

File size: 12.6Mb
Triangles: ~280k with 1 level of subdiv on the sand and water, 253k without
Objects: 26,432, though 90% of those are instances

I’m pretty pleased with the scene overall, specifically the main elements: the water, sand, chair, umbrella, and beer cooler. The further background elements could still use a bit more grungefying, though.

Anyway, here are some pictures, and the download link at the bottom: