Behind The Scenes: Toy Workshop

I just love the end of the year season. It's not only about Christmas, but how it manifests into our lives at this time. I can remember my years in full-time job, when all the marketing X-mas craze ended, how we took things easy, played games and overall chilled. Applies to my school years as well.

Since I started doing 3D designs, I always look forward to make another winter or X-mas themed scene. And as the date got closer, I decided to go full throttle on the Christmas ideas. It isn't that long, that I've done a low poly toy workshop scene so it would be fitting to take another spin on the topic, but with a different style.

Lately I enjoyed creating more abstract almost infographic-like compositions with themes like movie, TV and games so I went for that.

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I created a Pinterest board and started to gather isometric Christmas illustrations and some generic isometric infographics as well, to have more colors and moods at my disposal.

The real challenge with compositions like this, is to put together a comprehensible layout from scratch. You're not creating any existing or coherent environment, so nothing will come to you intuitively. It's easy to place rocks around river, but this is completely artificial.

But I've found a method that works for me. After gathering as much reference material as possible, I go through each image and write down ideas to create sort of a checklist that I need to follow. And there is a notes feature directly in Pinterest so I can keep them close and tidy.

To better explain what I mean, it went something like this: "Central AI with Santa hat (lol), Sorting robot, Conveyors, 3D Printer, Self-flying Sleigh, Drone, Robot Elf, Stat Screen, etc.."

List goes on, but now you probably get the idea.

Include as much of these items as possible in the sketch. Again, the sketch can be just some scratches and lines marking the places and shapes for these objects and ideas. Doesn't really matter how it looks as long as it helps you to have a clear idea of what you need to start modeling.

I ordered the items in a way that would make sense in a real factory and logistics. There is an inbox that gets sorted out and selected requests are processed and scanned on their way to 3D printer. The resulting items are conveyed further towards the platform that gets raised and the product is packaged by an elf (up until this point, it sounded legit :D). It's picked up by a drone and loaded on the sleigh while stat screen displays overall performance and logistics. And there is AI brain somewhere with additional controls.

I counted the separate stages of production and it looked like I can go in circle around the square scene, while placing the brain in the middle. From that point, it was just fun, refining the sketch and adding more details from the TODO list, like representing the brain as a gingerbread tree in the glass ball with a hat (yeah, I know), Giving the drone and sleigh deer elements and adding some technical details, so it looks hi-tech.

You can watch the process video on Youtube