3D Landscape Design: Lake Moraine

I don’t often look at something I’ve created and go, “wow,” but this scene does it for me. 
Inspired by my 2018 trip to Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, the sheer scale and beauty of the landscape has stuck with me since my visit. 
I meticulously researched this scene to make it as authentic as possible — from calculating the sun position for a July sunset, finding the right rocks and trees (red spruce) for the job, to adding the anisotropy and absorption of the cloud particles, to approximating the properties of glacial meltwater to produce the characteristic refractive bright blue color. 
The mountain shapes were generated procedurally, so they don’t quite reflect the unique topography of the Valley of the Ten Peaks that include Lake Moraine, but much of 3D art involves approximation and shortcuts, so I chose a result that was pretty close. 
The slopes include thousands of individual tree models. The beach includes hundreds of debris particles and, in the beach close up view, a few thousand individual stones. 
Clouds are procedurally generated from a physically based shader I built out in Blender that absorbs and reflects/refracts the colors of the sun under different lighting conditions (see the daylight view in the comments below. 
The sky is generated by calculating the sun position based on elevation, latitude/longitude, time of year, and time of day, with a physically based atmosphere based on dust, air density, and ozone. The sun is at 306.59 degrees azimuth, 1.4 degrees elevation on a July evening if you’re curious. Days are around 16 hours long in midsummer this far north, and including twilight, the sky is bright from 5 AM until 11 PM. 
Fun fact: this view was featured was featured on the back of the 1969 and 1979 issues of the Canadian $20 bill, from which it got its nickname “The Twenty Dollar View.” 
Technical details: 
Modeled in Blender 3.0 
Textured, rock, and debris assets from Quixel Megascans 
Water, cloud, and sky textures procedural 
Trees generated with Botaniq addon and scattered with Gscatter 
Rendered in Blender Cycles 
Light post processing in Lightroom 
All objects rendered, no objects added in post.