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Exploring the Environment: Reference Material

In this lesson, I'll cover gathering references

as inspiration for your final project.

We'll start by sourcing from the real world around you

through photo walks in nature.

Then, we'll look at work that exists in real stuff

like architectural design work,

as well as sourcing inspiration from sites like Reddit and Instagram

as you build designs in your mood board for your final project.

One thing that is so important for me as I'm beginning any render

is observing the real world around me.

I always take the time to stop, listen, and observe

as I walk through nature.

I like to take a camera with me

and snap images of how light interacts with the surfaces.

I take close up looks at things like leaves

and see how light filters through the forest and onto the floor,

observe textures like looking at the soil or sand

and seeing how there are different color variations in the individual grains of sand,

as to if they're getting a bit of wetness from the ocean

or if they're dry and exposed to the sun.

Even looking at the sky itself too.

Often people think the sky is one color.

If you ask what color is the sky, "sky is blue,"

but if you look closer, there is so much variation,

almost a wonderful grading of colors across the sky as you look closely.

Whenever you're building a render, it's vital to look at the real world.

It's done the hard work for you and shows you how to represent things.

If you're ever stuck, take a pause and observe the real world around you.

For my final project, I'll work on a beach scene,

as that's where I sourced my inspiration from,

but feel free to observe anything around you in the real world

and try to source that as you create your scene,

building out textures inspired by the real world

and looking at lighting that imitates the lighting you'd see out in the wild.

Another set of inspiration for me

is paintings and works of art that exist.

I'm a fan of impressionistic work. Often, when I'm building my designs,

I go for representing a feeling as opposed to the real thing,

which is what impressionistic painters sought to represent.

If you look at Claude Monet's works, he'd do a lot of lighting studies.

He'd go to the same scene in real life repeatedly at different times in a day

and observe how the lighting changed in the scene

and represent that through his works.

I often source that inspiration when I'm building my works

and experiment with the lighting.

This is something I focus on in great detail

and I hope you do the same as you build your projects and beyond.

Another source of inspiration for me is content that is available online

at sites like Reddit, Unsplash, and Instagram.

I like to look at some work

that artists like myself are putting together

to get some inspiration for architectural design,

to see what elements and furniture work well in the scene

to create a sense of harmony in their piece.

I'll browse through sites like Reddit's Analog Community

to see the film photography work that folks are doing out there because you get an idea of the textural feel

of how photos are edited and put together.

It's nice to source that inspiration once again from a real representation

as you build your scene.

For my project, I'll be gathering a lot of references from the beach

that I'll be bringing into Blender as textures.

For example, I'll be looking to get some cool images of crashing waves

and then recreate that in 3D.

Feel free though for your own project to source inspiration and real images

from whatever you find around you.

As an added bonus, if you want to take your photo walks a step further,

there's a fantastic app

I've been experimenting a lot with on my phone called Polycam

that allows me to scan the environment around me.

I'm able to take my phone

and walk around a rock, root, or a trunk, for example,

taking pictures along the way,

and then the app will build out a real 3D object

that I can import into Blender and use in my projects.

That's for you if you're curious about how to do that, I'll walk through that as we store inspiration

from the real world around us later.

One of my favorite things to create in 3D

are these tropical lush landscapes.

If you look at my Instagram feed, you can see that inspiration

from my various travels coming through

in these lush environments that I like to create.

It's tons of tropical plants and crashing waves.

There's the presence of water in many of my renders

or nature intersecting with the built environment.

For our project, I'll create a similar thing

and show you the process of texturing something like this,

making a cool lush scene and tying it all together

to make an inviting dream space for your viewers to sit in.

This scene you see on the right is the one we'll create,

this beach home oasis.

It's a fun project

and it will go through many different techniques,

like how to photograph your environment and bring these textures into Blender.

These waves I created here, I photographed these in real life by walking around on the beach

and got them into Blender.

We'll texture the sand, make it look realistic,

like you see this wetness of the waves crashing

as it transitions up to the surface.

How to add assets and scatter them across your scene

like these plants you see here created in the Blender scene.

Our focal element,

I'll walk you through creating the built environment you see here,

the staircase, the handrails, all the columns, and whatnot.

Also, how to tie your scenes together by adding assets

from libraries like BlenderKit, built into Blender,

like creating the bed, chairs, and lamps

and then making them your own in a way,

so retexture them and bring them to life.

What I always focus on so much with my renders is the lighting design.

We'll see how to add extra details

to guide your viewer's eye into the scene,

like these candles on the surface are shimmering reflections on the water

and also our overall lighting of the sky here through HDRIs

and creating our background scene. This is a fun project.

All my projects, as I've mentioned before,

start with references.

It's so important to gather great references

when you're working in 3D

and always sourcing from nature as well if you get stuck.

It's important to return

to something that is created in nature when you're building your renders

to strive for photorealism.

For this project, I'll have you download a cool software called PureRef

that allows you to create these awesome mood boards.

With a lot of different photos and stuff you've captured,

you can quickly put them in here and then export this out

and bring it into Blender as a reference on the side

or keep it up on a second monitor as a reference throughout your project.

I encourage you to go for a photo walk, even if you don't live near the beach,

grab a camera and observe your environment,

see how the lighting interacts with the surfaces.

Take pictures of how it's reflecting through plants

and how it's diffusing through curtains and stuff like that onto the surface of your scene.

Then, take those pictures and bring them into your PureRef board.

If you aren't near a beach and need inspiration,

it's easy enough to search online as well for things now.

There are so many great images out there.

If I ever get stuck, like I don't live in the Mediterranean,

I'll search up images online for things.

One of the places I go to is Instagram.

I have a bunch of great saved photos here

I found through the Instagram explorer.

I found a whole bunch of awesome renders and photos

and stuff that I'll screenshot

and then bring into PureRef to have up as references.

I also use a site called unsplash.com.

We'll use this to gather some of our skies.

It's a royalty-free site with great images

and a great search engine

where you can search a variety of keywords.

Here, I searched Mediterranean architecture

to see some of the architecture

that'd be present in a scene like the one we'll design here.

You can save these images

and bring them easily into your PureRef mood board, which is awesome.

There's good old-fashioned Google.

This is a lovely national park I've spent time in Southern France

called Calanques National Park.

It has crystal-clear blue water.

I've sourced many images from here in the past for many of my renders

as inspiration for how the surfaces look.

When we're thinking about water, we think it's blue,

but there are so many colors going on in here

impacted by rocks and different depths,

parts of this are deeper or in shadow by the rocks and stuff around.

I'll look at this as I'm building the subsurface of my water.

We'll talk about that as well as we go through our scene design.

I go through a few different subreddits too for inspiration.

A great one is Vaporwave Aesthetics,

which has a lot of cool retro scenes and stuff like that

that you can look through for some inspiration

in terms of color palette as well.

Another one I source a lot from for inspiration

is the r/AnalogCommunity.

This is all film photography. Film has this characteristic of a bit of graininess

and strong color palettes to it.

It's a beautiful piece of artwork I feel with film photography

and it always has a nostalgic feeling for me.

I always try to channel that in my renders as well.

It's nice to look through here and see some of the photography

that's being done with real film cameras and then try to emulate that

with the lighting design and texturing in our scenes.

Once you get the images and bring them into PureRef,

you can organize them like how I've done here.

I have a bunch from photo walks and stuff I've been on in the past year

for overall inspiration for scenes and composition,

having these mountains and water designs here.

I also have a few inspirations here for building design.

A lot of those Mediterranean-style buildings that I've saved here.

This is a render I created before in the style I'm going for.

You can see a bunch of different images here

but the theme throughout them is the color palette. You have this vibrant green,

this turquoise, bluish-greenish water here,

and then the white, clayish buildings here

with maybe a touch of orange from the terracotta

or different chairs, tables, and stuff around it as well.

I've screenshotted some mood boards here for the color palette too.

To look up color palettes, there are different sites too.

One I go through a lot that's linked here is Coolors,

C-O-O-L-O-R-S.

You can screenshot and search for color palettes here.

I'm going for this darkish blue,

more like night mode that you see in our render.

Then, for our sand, we have a bit of a muddy brown

and then some yellowish colors coming at the midground here as well.

I've also sourced a bunch of images from a few beach trips I've been on

where I've taken a bunch of images of the shoreline.

This is how I've recreated it in 3D to the best of my ability

to show you how to displace the terrain here and also to try to mimic as much reality as possible here.

You see quite a bit of variation in color and texture throughout here.

You even have some sea shells and stuff scattered here

that I've tried to scatter as well in the render.

We'll source some of these images when creating these textures

and I'll show you how to do that later.

This is fun to have up here.

I encourage you to take as much time as you can for this first step

and continue to consult your references as you go through,

not only in this project but any project you approach.

Having references up and sourcing from nature

is essential for photorealism.

I can't stress that enough.

With 3D, it's all too easy to create something

that's perfectly rounded, perfectly smooth,

like our default cube here.

Rarely in nature will you ever see perfectly crisp, smooth edges

or perfectly similar colors, like everything is the exact same color.

There are always subtle variations

that you'll want to keep note of as you create your renders. Even zooming in on this clay here, for example,

there are many variations in color and also texture here.

You see these bumps and ridges throughout it as well.

Observe that in your references and also in the world around you.

Going on your photo walks, look at things closely.

Take the time to study the world around you.

In the next lesson, I'll map out my final project with a sketch.

It's OK if you're not the best artist, I'm also not the best hand-drawn artist.

This is to give us an idea of what to work with

as we start to build out the 3D scene later.