Blocking Out the Scene

You’ve built your assets – a lot of them.

Next, we’re going to make a scene. A full, complete scene. You’ll set the scene up, then you’ll create a camera to render it, and finally, you’ll create a finished rendered image of the scene.

That’s a lot to do.

So, we’ll start simple. Before we can build the scene and set anything up, we must have an idea in mind.

In this chapter, we’ll explore a couple of different ways to figure out how to make our scene. This will involve us trying things out, gathering ideas, and creating concept art. There are multiple ways to do this, so we’ll cover a few.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll:

• Have a complete concept or idea for your scene
• Understand how to come up with ideas for your scene
• Understand exactly what ‘concept art’ means

First, I’ll explain what I mean by building a scene.

What’s a scene?

First, let’s learn what a scene is.

By scene, I mean a full setup in your Blender file – models, materials, lighting, cameras, the whole lot. These must all be set up to make a nice, beautiful rendered image.

Making a render is a many-step process, so I’ll break it down:

1. Creating concept art: You create a rough sketch or idea of what you want to make.
2. Modeling: You create any assets you need.
3. Assigning materials: You make sure everything has a nice material on it.
4. Setting up the scene: You build the scene.
5. Lighting: You set up lights for nice lighting in your scene.
6. Rendering: You create the final render (the final image)!

Right now, we’re at the concept art stage. We need to figure out what we’re making, and, more importantly, what it would look like before we can make it.

That’s what concept art is for. Let’s make some.

Creating concept art

Concept art can be almost anything. Crude sketches, fancy hand-drawn images, photos, photoshopped messes, and even simple 3D setups using cubes. Anything. All it must do is give you a general idea of what your scene is going to look like and what you want your final render to look like.

Why bother with concept art?

The idea behind concept art is that you can test out your ideas – any ideas that you want – with much less effort than actually doing it in Blender. It also gives you a good general idea of how you want your scene to look – some concept art might help you figure out what mood, colors, and more you’re going for.

Every major movie, every TV series, and every video game makes heavy use of concept art to figure out what things look like before they’re made. There’s people who create concept art for a living. That’s their job. In bigger studios, 3D artists don’t have to worry about concept art...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned what it takes to make a full scene in Blender. You learned about the scene-building process, as well as what concept art is and what it’s for. You also learned how to make concept art using a few different methods.

If you only take one thing from this chapter, remember to do a rough sketch of your art before you try making it in Blender. Every time I don’t do a sketch, I regret it.

In the next chapter, we’ll dive right into setting up our scene.