Cycles Render:
For the mid-section challenge, I wanted to create a cosy cabin in the woods, possibly with rain
After looking up a few images of cabins and trying to find a cabin that would suit the feel I wanted, I found this, which became my design for the cabin:
I used just a normal cylinder scaled along the y-axis and applied an array modifier offset on the z-axis to get the front walls I wanted, I also used a mirror modifier and pulled the front walls forward so it would create front and back walls. I did the same for the other walls and changed their scale and rotation. I cut out the shape using a Boolean modifier and using an object I made to be the shape I want to cut off (this included the doors and windows). Then it was just a matter of modelling some shapes for the frames of the housing and then modelling the doors and windows. I added some outdoor decking much similar to the reference image scene and created decorations for the decking with some chairs, a table, and a lantern.
For the chairs, I used array modifiers and a curve modifier so I could give the chairs back legs a nice natural curve.
For the lantern, I mostly just modelled out of a cube using a bunch of extrudes and loop cuts and such, though for the wireframe I used a plane with multiple loops cuts both vertically and horizontally and rotated it 45 degrees, then cut out the shape I wanted for the lantern and connected all the faces that were now missing, applied a wireframe modifier with a thickness that seemed good and then I was good to go.
The windows were an interesting one to try and get to work right. Originally, I wanted the lantern to be see-through with the candle being visible, however, I wasn’t aware eevee needed to have screen-space reflections turned on to be able to get that effect on the material. Then once I got it working I didn’t feel it was fitting in line with the style of the scene so I gave the material an orange emission to give it a much warmer and more cartoony appearance that was more in line with the rest of the scene.
Materials are simple. I decided against using textures as they distract from the simplicity of the scene. I settled for simple colours except for the windows, those just use the principled shader with transmission set to 1 and roughness (not to be confused with transmission roughness) set to 0.3
Now that I had most of what the camera focuses on for my scene, I needed to create a background to go along with it. As I was opting for a forest scene, I modelled some low poly pine trees. Composed mostly of cone-shaped cubes and a cylinder for the base. I placed the origin to the bottom of the base so I could duplicate and scale the other pine trees without having to realign the base with the ground.
For the rest of my scene, I wanted to have rain as I felt rain would’ve made the cabin feel much cosier, despite the lack of detail. However, I am still inexperienced when it comes to Blender and couldn’t come up with a really good way to do it. I had no real clue about particle systems and whatnot and was already spending far too much time on this quick challenge as is. I did create some renders of it though and this was the best I was able to come up with:
EEVEE Render:
Cycles Render:
I’m quite happy with the cycles render actually, however, I needed to crank the sample rate for my render and even then I was still getting a lot of grain in the scene and my renders were already taking 45 mins+ so maybe if I learned how to optimize cycles I could get a better result but that’s too much work for this quick challenge. The EEVEE render would’ve turned out better if I could get motion blur to work on the rain, however, the current implementation of motion blur for eevee is not functional with particle systems and third-party scripts for eevee didn’t appear to function correctly.
After moving and rotating some objects and tweaking lights as well as adding some(the moonlighting), adding depth of field set to focus on the cabin/lantern depending on which scene, changing FOV of the camera to 35, and applying bevel to objects such as the chair and table and window frames, I got my final render.
I learned quite a lot about making a scene in Blender in the process of making this. I know that I used a lot of techniques not previously shown in the course series, i was however new to using them and learnt a lot about how to use them while creating this scene While I’m not new to Blender (been using it for quite some time in fact), a lot of the stuff I used to compose this scene was brand new to me, and parts from the course series, as well as stuff I decided to look up for help, were utilized to help me create the scene I wanted, and in doing so developed a lot of new knowledge with using Blender.
Anyways, wow that was a lot longer than I expected, I wasn’t originally intending on writing out my process for the whole thing, but I got carried away and thought why not. Its fun documenting these things and maybe I can learn more from your feedback about how went about certain things. Feel free to leave your feedback, I’d love to hear it.