Garden in a Bottle
The idea struck me while thinking about RUM! I thought that there are so many nicely shaped bottles that could be used as environments that I might as well use it to grow plants! What is more fantastic than a tiny precious world, that treasures our trash as their fantastic greenhouse, that houses the most beautiful flower among a sea of grass!
The bottle I chose is that of Charette rum, which is a homage to where my girlfriend is from (Reunion island). The rum is native to them and absolutely fantastic! Given that it's a tropical island, I used some banana leaves in the background and grass that resembles sugarcane to stay with the theme a bit. I Added the snail to give the scene a bit of life, and so that it's not so abandoned (also so it balances out the composition).
Lessons? Use your block out and don't cram detail where it's not showing. Still, I consider it one of my best renders, and I feel that I've stepped up a notch making it. Sure had a ton of fun working on it!
final render after post
viewport scene.
This was a competition piece, and I needed just one still, therefore asset quality and speed were favoured over optimal mesh density. I was aiming to get good normals and reflections without any bakes
Shattered glass was a challenge, but in the end I found a middle ground between geo an texturing to achieve a sharded look
These were perhaps my favourite assets to paint, I tried to work off real life brands to aid the realism.
Looking at the diffuse texture, I really liked the color balance I was striking with those assets
Although I have never made a character or an animal, I absolutely loved working on this little fellow, and he really brought the scene together for me.
Some other bits and bobs created for the scene, the ice cream stick, match, and matchbox front were textured within blender wih pretty much just color texture and constant roughness given how I used them. String had a particle system for fraying.
These are mega scans textures (free sample) however as the competition was calling for very limited external assets, I made the geo myself. I was aiming for less alpha overdraw and more detail in bending and shaping of individual strands
I then used a particle system to create a clump I could duplicate around. I ended up using a subD on it to smoothen out the reflections
Dry/dead bits of the grass atlas were made to create trims for the edge of where the grass meets the mud
As with grass, I took an external texture sheet and made the cards and models myself. I was very pleased with the effect and how much colour it brought.
Triple ply daisies as I made just one model, and relied on a lot of rotation and angle variation to populate the scene, and did not want the flatness showing.