Blender School: Basic Design Rules

 

Piotr Krynski's
Efficient Environment Design
for Blender  #3

3. Basic Design Rules

1. Big, Medium, Small

In order to show that something is big you need to contrast it with small things. Points of reference!

2. Repetition. Creating a scene involves adding lots of different elements. The quality if the visual experience will be governed by how these different elements work with each other. Use repetition as a way of giving the scene an underlying order, like the refrain of a song, a kind of visual reference point or commonality.

3. NEVER HALF. Breaking elements in half is a way to instantly remove stimulating qualities from a composition. The Rule of Thirds is your friend.

Rust placement

See how the rust areas creep in and don't go halfway across one panel. The result is large areas of calm punctuated by the rust noise. See how the rust noise has a strong naturalistic character. It doesn't look like the product of a noise node.

Piotr creates a sketch and demonstrates his thinking in terms of visual tension and repetition, where things need to be varied and where they need to echo.

Don't overdo your sketching. Once you move into 3D, things will always change. It's hard to predict how shapes will translate into 3D.

4. Preparation

Before moving to Blender, you need to get your story straight. In this lesson, Piotr runs through his preparation for his amazing canal shot, partly inspired by a level in Halflife: Alex.

1. References. Look for ideas and inspiration

2. Use your references to plan your shot and your time. What elements will be quick to create, what could be repeated? Don't spend a lot of time building something you use once in your scene somewhere in the background.

3. Don't try to do too much in a scene. Originally Piotr was going to include a chase but evoking the necessary tension draw attention from his intended subject: the cool environment.

5. Addons

There are a bunch of addons that Piotr finds super-useful... Piotr focuses on what he needs for this course, not what is overall a good addon.

S-Tier  (The essentials)

Tootimize-tools

This critical addon manages scene optimisation. Intelligent file-size reduction will impact your performance. High-spec modern PCs can handle vertices, but moving massive textures around will often cause lag.

Drag-and-Drop

 This isn't a sexy add-on, but it saves time when you want to drop objects into a scene by cutting out a lot of menu driving time.

Curve Basher

Mastery over curves and therefore wires. How does this compare with Cableator?

Simply Cloth Pro

This is now called Simply Cloth Studio. 

Gaffer Manager

A really good HDRI manager that lets you put in HDRIs and manage them.

Hard Ops

[Got this] This needs no introduction, but I need to pick up that training course.  

A-Tier

Aquatiq water library

This is just an excellent resource for complex and varied water shaders.

Forestation

[Got this] Amazing resource of scanned trees. It doesn't go S-tier because even the low-poly versions have massive polycount. You may need to decimate.

Piotr thinks that Terrascapes assets are the best for Blender. Also, a bit heavy.

Pro-Skies

This is an amazing resource for drop-in sky HDRIs. Very efficient but the presets become a crutch and the settings seem too low for light values and shadows, e.g. a high sun doesn't generate the expected light values, it's too dull.

B-Tier

E-Cycles/K-Cycles

Great because it can save a scene because it uses non-standard rendering. However, its non-standard and can trip you up.

Geoscatter 

It's an amazing add-on, but it gets you caught up in geometry nodes. Piotr uses the shrink map modifier on a plane. It's easier and faster. Hmm, I'm not sure. Piotr has a good point about how grass objects are often too small and so require too many scatter objects to be convincing.

C-Tier

Mask Tools

Great tool but Piotr avoids using procedural tools for edge ware and these kinds of procedurally driven textures. It's a great tool, though.

Fluent-Materialize

[Got this] It can impact performance.


Physical Starlight and Atmosphere

[Got this] This is an amazing addon for realism and power, but it is C-tier because it is a resource hog. It introduces a lot of lag when doing quick scene iterations. It is amazing for less demanding scenes.