I’ve been working to try and exercise a lot of different parts of the create process to get better at the art aspect of modeling. It’s great to model things, it’s better to get them to look good or evoke a mood.
Thanks to the great courses out there like CGBoost and people like Andrew Price, Grant Abbit, Ian Hurbert and CG Matter I’ve been able to go from making the worlds simplest table as a Unity asset a year ago to trying to get better at thinking something through and feeling like there is some progress in my results.
Lighting and color as well as detail are the things I’m going to have to work on the most and it shows in this particular scene, but here is the thought process of it from start to finish.
I started with my wild idea sketching which is an art form all its own:
From there I started to try and get a quick rough model of what that might look like, as I setup my camera angle:
Then I tried to add the moon/cloud mix so I could see where it would live in the scene. The volumetric could I created made me sad.
I then started to try to get a feel of how the lighting would work, and created procedural clouds using the node setup from the CG Matter tutorial. It made it click MUCH better
Then I wanted to add some depth of field and some objects to help add more depth overall, with a little texture painting because it’s soothing and doesn’t require me to go to cc0 or texture haven like…I will do for everything else.
I then modeled some grass, threw it into a collection, gave it some randomness and painted it onto the ground plane with a 4k ground texture underneath to make the rest look believable.
Then, I remembered that moths are really just bats that aren’t bats. I used Ian’s moth tutorial so I could make an exploding bat ball after modeling some simple bats.
Then it was time to texture everything and seek opinions about light.
A friend pointed out my lighting did not convey depth, and I think for this particular scene I found something that worked for me.
Bonus, the exploding bat ball.
