Spacious Scene with a Lighthouse in Blender & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Olga. In 2016, I left my career as a lawyer, and knowing nothing about the CG industry, I began learning through online tutorials and started a blog as a 2D Artist. After gaining some experience, I started looking for a job in the game development industry and ended up in a game outsourcing studio. A few years later, I realized that 2D graphics were not enough for me, so I began studying 3D graphics. Over the past three years, I've learned a lot by working on various projects. Some of these include the projects 1901, Robot Battle (still in development), the completed Battle for Giostone, and many others.

I work at the international company Atlantis AR, where I create characters and environments and handle rigging for Augmented Reality. I'm currently studying animation and visual effects, and working at this company inspires me to improve my professional skills.

Inspiration

I've loved lighthouses since childhood. To me, they symbolize faith and hope. I spent a long time searching for the right references because the initial concept was quite raw. My favorite lighthouse is Roter Sand in Germany.

I wanted to create a sense of airiness and harmony in my scene. I live by the sea, where there are birds and lighthouses, so I wanted to create a scene with my own vision.

Modeling, Retopology & Unwrapping

A significant part of the objects in the scene are 2D images with pre-drawn shadows and volume, which took the most time. The main tools I used in Blender for this scene were GeoNode, animation, simulation, turbulence, cloth parameters, and wind.

Retopology in the scene is only present for the lighthouse, houses, and rock. I unwrapped these objects in UV and painted them in Substance 3D Painter. To add volume to some details, I used a Normal Map, which I later had to remove because it created an unwanted 3D effect.

Texturing

I don't like it when things are shiny. I feel like it creates a plastic effect, so there's almost no gloss in the scene's materials. The waterfall and water surface were made using GeoNode (a fantastic Blender tool) and looped with keyframes. The clouds were hand-drawn in Photoshop and animated using blendshape.

Composition & Wind Simulation

I wanted to capture as much space around the main composition as possible to make the scene airy. However, as a result, there was too much empty space at the edges of the scene, which might have negatively impacted the overall look of the work.

I used Blender's wind simulation. It's a simple and effective tool for animating fabric and anything that can be classified as fabric, such as flags, sails, vines, and grass. The Turbulence Tool was used to animate the grass.

Presentation

Presentation is the most challenging process for me because I rarely deal with rendering in my work. Usually, I hand over models to animators, and they set them up in the game engine. For the bird in the scene, I created a simple rig controlled by three controllers:

The objects in the scene don't change; only the textures do. It looks like this:

Lighting & Rendering

I rendered the animation in Blender and added the Sepia Effect and sounds in Movavi Video Editor Plus. This was the easiest stage of the project.

Setting up the scene for different times of day was the longest process because I struggled to achieve a smooth transition from one state to another. I had to draw and refine more than 10 versions of the sky to get the desired effect. Drawing the daytime sky was the easiest. The nighttime sky also took little time since Photoshop has a good preset, which can be further refined using Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast. However, the evening sky was the most challenging and had to be hand-drawn several times.

Conclusion

Working on this type of project, incorporating animation, simulations, and GeoNode, was a completely new experience for me. I will continue to study these tools for many years. The most challenging aspect was definitely setting up Geonode, as it can be difficult to stop tweaking things to make the result good enough. This tool opens up limitless possibilities for creativity.

To other artists, I would like to say: never stop dreaming. You might think your work isn't good enough, but I urge you not to give up, even if you encounter setbacks. Through trial and error, you will find your style and your place in the industry. And one day, you might even lead the trends! But you'll never know unless you keep trying!

Olga Iva, 3D Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford