Hide | 3D Environment Concept Art
And here is the making of – if you are interested to have a look. But let me give you a break down as well.
/concept.
The concept was simple. I knew that I wanted to have one man standing on the platform and another hiding beneath it. And make it sci-fi. That’s pretty much it. So, not much.
I started out with blocking some shapes and decided to focus on the general idea of the scene. I applied a generic grey material on everything and kept the scene simple. Main goal was to set up the mood and the direction I could take this scene too.
When I first opened Blender to work on this I was thinking of some hangar. However, as I was exploring different shapes and placements, I started liking the idea of this being some kind of engine / factory room with large pipes going through the space.
Initially I was planning on having a wall behind the platform. However, this was coming off flat and I needed a little more interest in the back. That’s why I added the pipes coming from the top of the room. This way I managed to open up the space and give it a bit more depth.
/set up
The whole scene is set up on repeating geometry nodes. In the beginning, I was adding an array modifier to every geometry but that quickly became tiresome. Because of a previous project, I knew how to set up a collection in geo nods that could repeat automatically. Having a collection like this on the side proved to be very helpful and sped up the whole process.
I could quickly change, adjust or replace elements without worrying that it would create too much geometry. Despite the size of the scene, I didn’t experience many fallbacks in the performance of the software.
There is one collection for the bottom of the scene, which includes the pipes and the platform – so in other words, the forefront. Another collection consists of the pipes in the back that had to have a higher count than the elements in front. Besides that, there are elements like some wires in the middle and characters that sit outside of the geo nodes array.
I began composting the scene with Cycles in mind. However, upon adding more and more elements and especially when I started applying the textures the render time began to take too long. Even though I wasn’t planning on making an animation, I did want to have that option. Which in the end I also acted on.
With Cycles, my render time was over 1 hour with 1000 samples. And the denoiser was having a hard time with the volumetric in the front. When I changed to Eevee my render time went down and I was able to render out 120 frames in about 5 hours. Which I think is quite a bit of a trade-off.
/characters.
The models I used for the animation are from Mixamo. Since character modeling animation wasn’t really my main goal I decided to skip this process entirely and place the models in my scene. With the Mixamo add-on, I was also able to generate a control rig for the Mixamo skeleton and that saved me a lot of time.
For the character below the platform, I adjusted the up colours in Blender and replaced the original textures. Even though, looking back, we can hardly see him in the shadows. Which was actually the point.
/compositing.
I started with compositing in Blender using nodes, however, I wanted to have more control so I decided to render an open EXR sequence and do the final compositing in After Effects. I feel more comfortable using AE and that allowed me to do some more post.
/textures.
When it comes to modeling I feel pretty okay, however, the texturing part of 3D creation is still something I struggle with. Even though a lot of textures would look good on the preview, when I place them in the environment they behave differently and I’m often finding it difficult to make them work. Some of that issue might be the render engine since Eevee has a different way of reading textures and not all textures that work in Cycles will work in Eevee.
To make this whole problem bearable I decided to keep the textures procedural. Which worked to some extent.
/final thoughts.
I really enjoyed working on this project. I spent some extra time on elements that are not really visible in the final render but I wanted to take my time and give that environment some love.
I’m really happy with how it turned out but as always I’m already seeing bits and pieces that could be improved. But I will put this one behind and move on to another.
Happy creating!
Tori x