ASTRAY – Environment Building Workflow in Blender

What will you learn?
translate 2d art into a 3d environment
make your own library of nature assets useful for any outdoor scene
build a hut you can customize to build various houses
the ability to create nature scenes from start to finish
knowing how to make your scene shine with the best lighting
using your camera to present your scene
next step: creating your own epic worlds in Blender

Chapter 1: Pre-Production & Proxy Build
At first glance, you see a painting by Nathan Proffitt (the course author’s brother). Look closer…and find assets for your 3d world.

Call out those assets and build proxies for a spooky 3d environment.

Chapter 2: Creating Foliage
In this chapter you will create rocks, trees, and grass. These are essentials for any outdoor scene you will make in the future.

We’ll model, texture and sculpt our way to an entire library of outdoor assets, ready to drop into our scene.

Chapter 3: Building The Scary Hut
In the midst of what might otherwise be a walk in the dreamy woods is a ram-shackled hut. It’ll be a walk in the park to build it together.

Seriously, though. We’ll dig into the planks and door, the deck, windows, roof, porch and canopy to build the centerpiece of our story.

Chapter 4: Look Dev
Here we go into all the details of our hut, the lantern and the landscape to bring our environment to life…or, more fittingly, to death.

Chapter 5: Scatter & Set Dressing
It’s time to populate our environment and set the scene. We’ll be working on scattering and utilizing raycast node to randomize the elements and assets within the environment. In a very intentional way, of course.

Chapter 6: Rendering & Compositing
Lighting can make or break your scene – and in this chapter, we’ll light our scene for theatrical quality.

We’ll tackle to world and key lights as well as the background and accent lights. The challenge: create a dark environment that shines.