Last week, I spoke about my journey into Blender 3D, and also gave a few tips that helped me. Obviously, I’m not a professional, and all I spoke about was what had helped me. But, this time I thought it’d be interesting to talk about the creation of a scene. I’ll briefly go over the creation progress of it all, as I created and animated all the 3D models myself.
Before we begin, this post has been given my stamp of messiness. Meaning this post is a bit of a mess so I can not guarantee you’ll learn something.
So to begin, here is the final image.
To start, I think the basics is to get the layout correct. Making sure you’ve got your camera in a good spot and making sure you have a rough layout so you know where things are. It’s always good to have an image of what you want to do. That image could be concept art you’ve drawn or just in your head. Either way, it’s super helpful to have a base. For me, I knew I wanted to do a room that felt small but also cosy and warm. I knew the bed would take up most of the space along with the desk. The floor was always going to be covered in paper, as I knew I could use it to cover the blank area.
So I started with the desk. The location of the desk changes throughout as I get more of an understanding of where things should be. I also did the posters and paper first, as I knew I wanted them to fill up the walls, and they are super easy to make in Blender, as they are just a cloth simulation. As for creating the Desk and the laptop, it was fairly easy, I used my own desk and laptop as inspiration. As the scene is dark, I didn’t need to make them super complex as you’d never see the details.
Afterwards, I started to experiment with lighting a bit. I created a simple low poly lamp using an image from google as a reference. I dragged in the point light and gave a few of the inside polygons an emission texture to give it that glowing bulb look. It’s super simple but helps the scene a lot. I won’t go into too much detail about the lamp, but just like everything else, I created it using mostly the basic Blender shapes. I used the Boolean modifier to help cut out part of the lamp to fit in the cone. I recommend learning about the Boolean modifier from a professional tutorial, as it’s super useful.
After the lamp, I decided to torture myself by modelling a fan. The fan was a huge pain as it was several parts, and I knew I wanted to animate it. The blades of the fan were created using the array modifier, located around a centre point in the centre of the fan (it’s hard to explain but the blades were created and rotated around a point in the middle of the middle sphere). Additionally, I also wanted windows. So I threw together some windows by cutting them out of the base and it helped add a bit more lighting to the scene. What helped me make the fan, was breaking it down into parts. The base, the outer ring, the fan. Once that was done, it was just about combining them together.
With most of the models done, I only had one thing left, and that was the bed.
The bed was super easy to do. The wooden parts are just a cube that has been scaled and had a few of its polygons stretched at the end to create the backboard thingy. The pillow is a smooth stretched sphere, and the cover was a plane with the Cloth modifier. I created a thick plane and gave it the cloth modifier, dropping it over the bed, and applying the modifier at the frame I liked best. By applying the modifier, you are basically sticking it into that position. It’s super simple and gives a great effect. A little fun fact, the posters around the room are all drawings I’ve created. Some are book covers, youtube thumbnails, and some are random drawings. You should be able to find them all on my Twitter somewhere.
All that was left was polish.
I felt that the camera was too far away, so dragged it closer and started to experiment with lighting. I originally wanted moonlight, with a nice blue at night, but changed it to a more sunset type look.
One thing I wanted, was to get the shadows from the window frames on the walls. Originally, I didn’t know how to do this, because I don’t know how real-world lighting fully works. So I did some research into how real-world lighting works. And to get the intense shadows, you want a somewhat far away light. (I could be wrong, don’t quote me on this). (Also at some point I modelled a chair, based on my own one, and yet again using the array modifier to create the wheels. I modelled it to fill up the empty space, and it makes sense for the narrative of the scene for a chair to exists in what seems like a messy students room).
This is the final one that you saw at the start. It can be hard to get an understanding of how it’s all constructed, so here is what it looks like without lighting.
When you look at it here, it’s much clearer, but the lighting also hides all the mess. My models aren’t the best, so the lighting does a good job with it all. I’d say to start by modelling what you can, start with simple things and do use references. There are a million people better than I am at modelling, and I’m sure a thousand tutorials for it all. But, when you know how to move vertices and extrude your faces, you’ll be able to create most things.
I did mention that there are animations in this, and it’s true. I did create a few animations, but showing them off in this blog post is a bit annoying. I won’t speak about how to learn animation, as, once again, I’m not the best. But, if you have an understanding of keyframes you’ll easily understand it.
If you wish to check out the video, you can check it out here https://twitter.com/SlippyfopTV/status/1402342828492066818
That’s all from me. This post was a bit of a mess, so I’d like to try it again at some point. My problem with writing this post was that I decided to do it too late into developing the thing. I would have shown more and more of a breakdown if I had rendered them.
But, thanks for reading. As always, be sure to follow if you like my stuff, and check me out on other platforms. My links are below.
My links: https://linktr.ee/FabledByte
Arbitrary Echo: https://linktr.ee/ArbitraryEcho
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