2025 Collab: Week 01 “Urban environment” - VOTE CLOSED

[FedPete]

This is the Blender Collaboration 2025, week 01 challenge. Don’t be afraid to join, a lot of us are beginners. This is all to practice, have fun, learn, and get together.

This week’s subject is “Urban environment”.

• Urban environment - A view from inside a city of your choice. New or old, real or imagined, let’s practice our urban scene designs.
• Subject selected by the previous Week 51, 2024 “ Snowman " winner Turgul ~ There were more winners, but Turgul selected the new topic.

The rules are simple. 1 subject, 1 entry, 1 week.
You create whatever object or scene or whatever you can think of that has something to do with the subject. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, all entries are welcome!
Post your picture here in this thread. At the end of the week, we start to vote. And if you are the winner, you may choose the next subject and win a unique badge.

Deadline: 2025-01-04T22:55:00Z

• Last week’s collab: Blender Collab: Week 52 “My favorite present”
• Next week: 2 - Speeders
• See all previous challenges in Hall of Fame 2024
• Halls of fame 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020

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[FedPete]

First concept

WIP

Introducing compositor (Cycles)

Final (no time)

[mfortunato]

Super trippy! It looks so cool. I wish I had time this week to work on an entry. I wanted to work on some hard surface modeling. I probably still will, just not for this collab.

[Turgul]

Still very much a work in progress. Not going to be able to put nearly enough time into it, but we’ll see where it gets. First time relying on image textures for part of a collab.

WIP:

Submission:

[mfortunato]

Nice Edward Hopper reference. Good job thus far as it is immediately recognizable.

[FedPete]

We @BlenderCollab have a few days to vote. You can vote fast but also think slowly about design, colors, technique, difficulty, subject, realism, etc. Choose consciously and not on your entry.
The new subject week 02 “Speeders” has already started. The winner of this week’s “Urban environment” challenge may select a subject for next week 03 and win a badge.

Urban environment

• FedPete
  

  

• Turgul
  

  

[Turgul]

Thank you! I’m glad it’s recognizable, even lacking in detail. I was introduced to the painting a few months ago and thought it was a fitting subject for the topic (though I thought of this week’s topic before this reference came to mind). I also wasn’t certain people would be familiar with the reference

[Megane_Wang]

I did not know the reference, but now that I have seen it, I definitely recognize it Very nice!

[Turgul]

Congrats on your win with your fantasy city of arches! It’s a cool concept and lots of visual interest in your render
I wonder what else you would have done with more time

[FedPete]

My biggest time consuming thing is always lighting and materials. Besides vert count, because my old hardware is very basic nowadays. So rendering EEVEE/Cycles takes me a lot of time.

Even the diagonal light beams are fake (images).

To get some depth (environment scale) I just increased the size of things. But that is not the right way to do it. You also need to work with distance, so that effects like fog, mist etc. can be applied. But those effects lead to time consuming renders.

Things I tried to implement, but didn’t do it completely

• Building texture more or less human construction (tiles, stones). The original homemade texture (Krita) has this. But the current texture is more or less a blessing in disguise by working with vonoroi, trying to make the tiles, stones, less repetitive.
• The small house was very low poly, because I wanted to paint them (Krita/UV-Map). But it lacks details. I tried to add some roof beams…
• If you want to make things look big. You can add small details, which the viewer uses as a reference. That’s why I added a person to the scene. But I think this trick doesn’t quite work because of the camera settings. I wanted to add details like clotheslines, flags… small things, more verts…
• The compositor settings make the whole scene blend a bit. But changing options takes (render) a lot of time. So I have to focus on other parts of the project.

Also

• I try to build up my Blender assets. And try to use things I already have. That doesn’t always save time. Because you made an object for a specific use. Maybe in low poly. And then you need a high poly version. Or your asset is not modeled that well. Or scale issues, or… You also end up updating old assets in a new project.
• I try to make my own textures with Krita. That has a steep learning curve too. I learned how to make repeating tiles in Krita (with just one click). So playing with that took up project time too
• I try to implement things I learned from others. Or other techniques. For example, I like Grease Paint, but I don’t practice enough with it.

[FedPete]

@FedPete Congratulations on your entry for “Urban environment”

---

• Turgul - Many years ago an other student did the same painting reproduction as you did. But can’t find the topic anymore. And your project reminds me of an other collaborative project. Also a Hopper painting

Team Project 1 - Hopper's Western Motel

Ok, let’s get this project rolling! This is the subject that we will try to recreate in Blender: [image] As I wrote previously in the original discussion, I’d go with a low poly recreation of the scene; a few points: the final render will be static, so the woman can be either rigged and posed or directly modelled in pose, however the person who will model her feels the most comfortable with by the same token, while I think that most of the element should be in the correct scale to make bui…

[Turgul]

@FedPete

My biggest time consuming thing is always lighting and materials. Besides vert count, because my old hardware is very basic nowadays. So rendering EEVEE/Cycles takes me a lot of time.

This makes a lot of sense. I remember long ago (nearly 25 years ) playing around in 3d with Bryce to make landscape renders and having to wait a while even for basic renders at 640x480. Fortunately my current machine is a lot more performant.

@FedPete

Things I tried to implement, but didn’t do it completely

• Building texture more or less human construction (tiles, stones). The original homemade texture (Krita) has this. But the current texture is more or less a blessing in disguise by working with vonoroi, trying to make the tiles, stones, less repetitive.
• The small house was very low poly, because I wanted to paint them (Krita/UV-Map). But it lacks details. I tried to add some roof beams…
• If you want to make things look big. You can add small details, which the viewer uses as a reference. That’s why I added a person to the scene. But I think this trick doesn’t quite work because of the camera settings. I wanted to add details like clotheslines, flags… small things, more verts…
• The compositor settings make the whole scene blend a bit. But changing options takes (render) a lot of time. So I have to focus on other parts of the project.

It would have been cool to see this all together, but there’s always more we can add, isn’t there? I definitely would have liked to add more detail to my diner instead of having everything be flat on the exterior.

@FedPete

I try to make my own textures with Krita. That has a steep learning curve too. I learned how to make repeating tiles in Krita (with just one click). So playing with that took up project time too

This seems pretty involved. I just started the texture painting course of Grant’s, and even that seems like it can take a lot of time. Usually I generate my materials in the shader editor, but I didn’t have nearly enough time for this entry. I suppose at some point I’ll have a bunch of materials in my asset library which should speed that up, but not there yet.

Anyway, still a cool looking render!

@FedPete

Turgul - Many years ago an other student did the same painting reproduction as you did. But can’t find the topic anymore. And your project reminds me of an other collaborative project. Also a Hopper painting

Looks like a neat project. Group projects like this seem like a challenge to organize!