Articles 465
March 28, 2016 2:00 PM
by Editor in Chief
How long it would take to learn Blender to create a scene like the above, supposing that you are totally new to Blender--or 3D graphics for that matter? Check out the comment from this week's winner.
How, then, can you too qualify for this award? Please have in mind that this award is reserved for those that are on par with or that excel top notch works published by artists and studios. If such work does not appear during a given week, this award is not being given to anyone. So please submit your best work to www.blenderartist.org or to the Member's Gallery of this site, or Contact Us to show where your work is available on the internet. It doesn't have to be a Blender render, internal or Cycles. Any other render engine is fine as long as Blender was used as a part of your workflow.
So, it is with great pleasure that www.BlenderNews.org introduces to you the returning winner of the Render of the Week Award for the week of March 28, 2016: Martti Kaipiainen.
Title: Different Sides of Nature
Genre: Environment Design
Renderer: Cycles
Final Renders:
Geometries
Artist's Comment
About Me:
My name is Martti Kaipiainen, and I am a 22-year-old CS student from Finland. Even though I'm studying programming, visual arts have always been an interest of mine! I originally picked up 3D modeling 5 years ago at age 17, but only started getting into it more seriously in the last year or so. I mainly use Blender and ZBrush for my work, but have also included Substance Designer along with Marvelous Designer. I have done some work as a freelancer on the 3D field, but consider myself mainly a hobbyist.
About "Different Sides of Nature:"
Up until starting this project, I had mainly dabbled in organic characters and sculpting, but decided to try my luck at creating wide, open scenes with a lot of vegetation. For the first scene, which is the river in the jungle, I tried to go for as realistic a look as possible, while on the two latter ones I decided to just focus on mood and general atmosphere instead of realism.
All three of the scenes were created with the same basic technique: Create an overall outline and composition of the different elements in the scene. Where the horizon is, what are the important elements, what kind of a feel you want for the scene and so on and so forth. I like just placing very rough shapes to guide where different pieces of the scene will land and then refine piece by piece from thereon out, mostly by sculpting. Once the terrain is in place, I create the required assets for the scene (plants, rocks, trees etc.). I like to usually read what kinds of trees and plants would actually live in the environment the scene is set in, and then create multiple versions of each species of plant and tree for variation. I usually do this with a mix of using add-ons, sculpting, and just old-fashioned modeling.
The largest portion of the process was used for texture painting the maps for spreading the vegetation. Density maps, length maps and so on. This requires just a lot of trial and error; just thinking about what variations and setups could work, trying them out, and then altering what you did before.
For the lighting I usually just use a HDR image. If I want more contrast or sharper shadows I might add lamps (since HDR's rarely properly capture the actual brightness of the sun).
Post processing was done in Blender as well.
Related LInks:
1. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?391443-Various-Environments-(and-a-character!)
2. http://blenderartists.org/forum/member.php?114996-Poltto