Pretty much what [email protected] said. I usually start by making the foreground terrain, find a good angle which frames the terrain nicely and add a few assets to find the composition I’m going for and roughly block out where things are going to be.

Here’s an early render of the scene with just a few buildings and completely different lighting:

Once that’s all locked down, I start building from there. The next thing I did was start masking and sculpting the terrain, added the path and fixed displacement, then started building up assets slowly (fences, extra buildings, vegetation) to fill the empty areas, trying to emphasise parts of the image based on composition guides (thirds). Sometimes the camera will change very slightly during this, but not more than a few degrees at a time.

Then it was lighting, volumetrics (clouds, fog, fires), particle effects (birds, snow, embers), smaller assets (shrubs, fences, barrels / shields / skulls). After that it just becomes lots of tiny tweaks to colour, render effects (dispersion, rainbows) until I’m happy.

This was a few iterations ago before many of the last tweaks were added over the final 20 or so hours