Original subtitles

Blocking Out the Scene and Setting Up the Lighting

In this lesson, I'll get my project blocked out in 3D with Blender

and start setting up some initial lighting.

We'll tweak these parameters a lot later

but it's good to set an initial base as we get started.

Let's get going.

We'll be blocking out our scene here.

For this part, I want you to focus on macro details.

I won't get too nitty-gritty yet.

We want to block out the basic composition,

referencing frequently the mood board we put together in PureRef,

keeping a close eye on specifically elements we want in our scene

like the building elements,

natural elements like the water and sand.

Then also keeping an eye on the sketching that we did as well

to map out the elements of our scene using the rule of thirds,

understand what will go

in that foreground, midground, and background.

Again, focusing on the macro details for now.

Then we'll take in another level later. For this, to start things off, I'll drag over on my Viewport here,

so we have this right panel here to look through our camera.

If I hit 0, I can look through that camera.

Change the Resolution as well to 1200 x 1500 like we had before.

Then I'll reset my camera position to the origin here,

pull it back up a bit,

and then we'll drag this over a bit in our scene

and up a bit to see those grid lines again.

For my sketch, I wanted this to be a wide angle,

24 mm is pretty decent,

and then at a slight angle, looking in at our scene here.

When I'm modeling these macro details,

I only need to focus on what will be framed up in my camera

and not on all the aspects of the building.

We can give a hint of what will be in the frame here,

so as I'm blocking this, starting with this default cube,

I'm keeping that in mind.

I'll have these Composition Guides to reference

as I start to place our cube a bit in the scene.

I'll tab into Edit Mode here and hit G, Z and pull this up using Ctrl,

just up so that it's resting on that X-Y plane.

I'll scale this, Shift + Z, so that it's just along the X-Y

and pull this up so we have this huge base.

I'll push it deeper into my scene

so that we have this foreground in the lower panel here for our sand,

and this will be the midground element, the building here in our scene.

In the Face Select Mode, I can refine and pull this out so it's off frame.

Let me go to my Camera for a second, let me tab out of Edit Mode.

Down in the Viewport Display, you have this option Passepartout too

and if I turn this up, you can see it makes our surroundings more opaque,

so now it allows me to focus even more

on what is directly in the camera view, what the camera will be seeing here.

Back into Edit Mode, I'll pull this top face down a bit

so it's a bit flatter,

like a small panel there that we have going on.

I want this to be like a deck, almost like an L shape

like how we sketched out.

To do that, I'll pull this back part here a bit more so that it's almost to the edge border of my frame.

Using those modeling tools we talked about earlier in the course,

I'll hit Ctrl + R to enable the Loop Cut Select Mode,

click, and then we'll drag this over

so that we have a deck starting around this third side of our frame.

Now, I'll hit on this face,

and using another modeling tool, extrusion,

we can hit E and pull this out along,

so we have this little lip here almost that is forming what will be our deck.

For this, I'll have stairs coming down here,

going towards the beach like a little walkway.

We'll place a bed or something over in this corner of the frame

so we have your eye to draw there.

Then, up here, we'll have a top deck like we sketched out.

Let's start to macro detail model these out here as well.

I'll do another Loop Cut on this side here,

and then drag up this border side here

so we have a wall here to block out to have an idea for the height. Let me do that for this back edge too.

Let me add another Loop Cut back here.

Now we have this back border accounted for us.

If I select on these three of those faces and this one as well,

then hit E to extrude,

we can pull these up and see how that will fill out of the frame.

I'll want it so that this right side

is just above our middle line compositionally.

This is now dominating the middle of our frame,

which is fantastic, that's what we're looking for.

Then, I want to keep this one side open here

so we have a view out to the beyond, and it gives more depth to our scene.

Once we start placing the mountains and other details back there,

you'll have that to look at as well, which will be nice.

That looks great, I'll keep the roof off for now

as I'll do a bit of modeling in a second to get that there.

We'll continue to focus on our room elements here.

Let me cut around this plane here so we can make these little staircases.

If I do a Loop Cut here and pull this up a bit,

this allows me now to make a bit of a lip on our stairs here, like how stairs have a little ridge on them as they go up.

We'll also add that detail in there.

If I hit Alt + Shift and then click on this edge here,

it will select this whole loop around here of faces.

We want these in the front here

to be able to extrude them out and add that little lip detail.

I'll use C, then hold down Shift, and then paint around here.

Then you right-click to get out of this to be able to pan around your scene

to deselect the edges that I don't want.

Now I have these front edges selected.

I can hit Alt + E, which allows me to Extrude Faces Along Normals.

If I click on that and then pull up on my mouse,

now we're pushing this in or out depending on how it goes,

but perfectly along the normals of those faces, which is really nifty,

a nice shortcut to get that quick extrusion there.

If I turn off the Overlays, it's hard to see what this looks like,

you can see what that is doing. If I turn on Cavity in this drop-down,

you can clearly see what's going on, we have this nice ridge there.

That will be a great detail to have in our scene as we're modeling.

I'll add a second set of stairs here too

so we have a bit of a staircase going on.

To do that, let me extrude or pull down this bottom edge

a bit below the horizon.

Then I'll add another Loop Cut here and do that same thing as before,

Alt + Shift and then select around here and deselect the parts I don't need.

I noticed this was extruded off line so we didn't pull all of this down.

Let me grab that face too and pull that down here as well

so we have that all below our horizon.

Nice room for that extra staircase.

I noticed we're missing this back edge too.

Be mindful of all the faces you need on the bottom.

Now I have everything here.

Hit G and Z and pull this down, so now that's working.

Now let me do Ctrl + R again and then I'll extrude these faces here. I'll select the ones that I need here.

Hit Alt + E to Extrude Along Normals, then we can pull these out a bit here.

Now we have an extra little layer of stairs,

which looks really nice.

Let's add that extra lip to this

along that same area as we did with the previous one.

Selecting all these front faces

and hitting Alt + E to Extrude Along Normals.

There we go, we have our basic stairs going down into the little beach here.

This will be like a patio here.

I'll put a hammock there, so we have that in the frame.

To block those details out as well, let me label this for now.

This is our Mainframe.

It's vital to remember what these are as once we add shapes and stuff in here,

it will be confusing if it just says Cube 1, Cube 2, Cube 3 again and again.

Let me add in the columns here.

We'll do for now just macro details, the Cylinder.

I'll hit Tab and then Shift + Z to scale this down a bit here, pull this into the frame.

If I hit 3 on my Numpad, I can see a side view of this.

I'll hit this Toggle X-Ray mode

so I can see where things are in my scene a bit,

pull this up, so it's intersecting with our geometry here, like that.

That's the bottom edge, looking pretty good.

I'll turn that X-Ray off for a second to see a bit better.

I scale this up a bit more.

Then I'll grab this top face and pull it up.

This is where it would be easier to be in the side mode.

Pull it up so it's in line with that top edge there.

Now I want to hit Alt + D to make linked duplicates of this

so when I make a change to one, it applies it to all my columns

so we don't need to worry about making different adjustments to these things.

I can move these along

so that they support the heavy structure of our roof over our heads here.

I'll leave those there for now.

Now I'll make the roof.

To do that, I'll use a bit of curve magic here. I'll hit Shift + A, go to Curve, and then select a Bezier Curve.

Toggle X-Ray mode

and then Tab into Edit Mode to see this and expand this here.

I'll drag this over here, select this one, and then hit V.

This allows us to change the handle type for this specific vertex here.

I'll change this to Vector for now, so this is now a perfectly flat line.

I'll do the same thing for this one, Vector, pull it along the X-axis

so that it's resting on top of where our roof edge will be.

Then I can extrude this up by hitting E, clicking off it,

and then hitting G and then Y to constrain its movement to the Y-axis.

Pull it up so that point is on that top edge,

E to extrude it again,

and pull it along the X-axis so it's right here.

Here it will get interesting.

We want to have a subtle curve to it, a bend around this point here.

First, to get that, I'll set this up by pulling this point here,

and then I'll set this side up by pulling this point to here. I'll change its type from Vector to Free.

This will allow me to bend it a bit here.

The same here, I'll change this to Free, and extrude this out.

I'll add a point here.

Then, using these side handles,

we can get a bit interesting with how this will bend and curve.

By pulling this along there,

you can see how that is influencing the curvature of our little scene here.

If I click on these two points and hit F,

it joins them up now, so we have these connected.

We'll have to get a bit creative with how this is curving here

to make sure that we're getting a nice bend to it.

Let me go back to top-down mode here.

I'll change the mode on this one from Vector to Automatic

because we get a nice curvature here as well.

You can see how that's lining up.

This is all about pushing and pulling to your preference

to get it to a curvature that you like.

Sometimes it's jagged there,

so if that's the case, you can turn up your Resolution to 40.

Now that has smoothed it out, so it doesn't have that jagged edge, which is much nicer.

This will look a bit more natural when we use this curve in our render.

Adjusting this a bit more, we have a nice bit of a bend to this.

I'm making sure this is level and even.

We want to have a few different copies of this

because I'll use this a couple of times for both the roof and for handrails too,

so I'll call this Bezier Curve for the Roof.

Then, I'll Shift + D to duplicate that and also hide that from the Viewport,

but this will be our Bezier.

I'll add that in a second.

Now I've got this one selected.

You can go back out of X-Ray mode and then hit G and Z to pull it up.

This will be our roof over here, so I'll line it up with this top part.

Right now this is a curve,

so there's no geometry beyond the vertices,

but if I go over to Object Mode and then go down to Convert,

I can convert it to a Mesh.

If I Tab into Edit Mode, then go to Points Select Mode,

you can see we have a bunch of points clustered on where we have this curve. We don't have as many or any at all where there are here.

What I'll do is select these two and Subdivide,

open this menu and give them subdivisions

so we have more geometry.

It makes it a bit cleaner when we cut out some holes in this too,

or our geometry.

It's important to have that there so it doesn't glitch out Blender much

when we're doing some work on our subdivisions here.

Now I can go to Face Select Mode, select all, and then hit F

and this fills it in with geometry.

Now this is perfectly flat, so let's hit E to extrude

and then pull this up on the Z-axis.

Now if you look in our Camera mode, we have a nice ceiling going on.

My camera is a bit too close as we want to see that top deck.

Let me pull this back a bit here.

Now this is framing up our scene a bit better.

We have a nice view of our little patio that will be off to the side here.

This column I'm noticing is a bit off from the roof,

so let's pull this in a bit here. That's looking pretty great, so we have a nice little setup already.

This will be our roof.

I can now change this to be our Roof.

I'll Shade it Smooth as I notice a bit of weirdness to it.

If it's doing that craziness, turn our angle on our Normals down to 30

and that's looking more reasonable too.

Same deal with this, we can Shade this Smooth,

and Auto Smooth it too.

We're getting nice-looking geometry, we have a nice base scene here going.

I'll add in our foreground here soon.

This will be our sand plane, so I'll label that Sand,

and I'll scale this up here a bit

so that it is underneath our little stairs

leading down to the beach if I pull that over there,

and then I'll pull this edge along the Y so it's out of frame there.

Pull this one over a bit here so it's out of frame there.

We have this nice sand.

Right off the bat,

I'll grab this front edge here and pull it down.

If you see reference images of the beach,

let me pull up my PureRef again, you can see there's a subtle little lip oftentimes to it.

This is a bit raised and eroded from the waves crashing against it.

There's often a bit of curvature coming up here.

I want to simulate that with my modeling

and have that little bend to the beach,

so it's naturally curving upwards and then over.

It almost looks like if I draw a Bezier Curve here with it quickly.

Let me pull this here.

It will look like...

Top-down view mode on this.

We'll have our shoreline like this, almost a curve going down

so it's ridged along here, flat, and then it will go down.

Let's simulate that with how we'll model this out here.

On our front, completely inverted, there we go.

To do that, first I'll add some geometry to this.

Let's Subdivide this a few times, give it a bunch of cuts

so we have some geometry to work with.

Then, using Edge Select Mode here

and with Proportional Edit selected, this little button here, I can now select across by hitting Alt

and then clicking down on one of these edges.

Let me hit that again, Alt + Shift and then select.

Now I can hit G to grab,

and then we can pull this up a bit so you see what it's doing.

It's forming a bit of this curvature to it.

I'll do the same up here a bit.

Let me click off these as we're selecting on some still.

Then pull this up a bit here.

This is giving us a bit of that lip to it.

That is working pretty well.

I might want to pull it up a bit here

so it is underneath the stairs, blocking that area a bit.

That is blocking that gap I was seeing there before.

Now this has a nice curve down to it.

I might pull this back edge over a bit more,

so if I get G and then Z and grab this,

pull it a bit more here so this has a bit more to it.

Let me select one of these so we get more of that dip to it too. This is a lot of trial and error, I may revisit this as I go through.

By looking from this side, I'll look at that, that's looking good.

It's looking a bit too regular, so I'll switch to Sculpt Mode.

Don't get scared, this is easy, the sculpting is not too crazy.

We will use the Inflate brush

and I'll hit F and then move my mouse to scale this up a bit.

I'll put a bit of brushing on this so you can see what that's doing.

If I hit Shift, it smooths it out a bit so it's not as crazy.

I'll also add sand collecting in the crevices around these stairs

like it probably would over time, wind would blow into these gaps here

and it would get stuck.

I'll add a bit of that imperfection to our surface here.

We'll revisit this later

as we start adding some displacement and textures to this.

That looks ok for now.

I'll Shade it Smooth so we have it there as well.

We have our foreground elements.

Let me add these to a specific collection

by selecting all of them hitting M,

and then we'll add this to Midground and call it Buildings,

so we keep an eye on what this is and then this will be added to our foreground elements.