Behind The Scenes: Winter Town

Let's be honest. Even if you really enjoy working on new projects, sometimes it can get a little bit harder to get in the mood. But great work isn't about lucky moments. It's about showing up consistently and regardless of your mood.

Luckily, it can be helped. For instance, if your work is inspired by a popular show or movie, why not running the show on the second screen for a bit of extra flavor and enjoyment? Get in the moment a little bit more. Of course, your focus might suffer, but if you do this on a rare basis and only when it makes sense to push yourself a bit more, isn't ineffective work better than no work done at all? 

And if it works with pop media, it works with seasons as well. This week, there was a little bit of snow outside and everything felt calm and slowed down. I didn't want to push vertices around. I wanted to put something in the oven while playing Playstation and listening to Buble.

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So I tried to fill as much of these variables as I could, only replacing the Playstation part with Blender. And to top it all, I decided the work should be seasonal too.

I searched for some winter references and stumbled upon picturesque winter shopping street. That's the one! I immediately searched for more angles, more shops, display windows, you name it.

After a while, I had pretty wide selection of winter town streets with decorations and patches of snow. I really loved four elements from the board. Corner door, window row with triangular tops, ship display window and old fashioned streetlamp with mailbox. And snowy tree of course, you can't beat that.

That was quite a lot of elements to try to push around randomly, so of course I took a pencil and tried to come up with a suitable layout. I reached few weeks back and remembered how I fit two buildings like this on the Western theme. I thought it might work here as well, so I sketched it in and really loved the layout.

But the front looked a bit empty and I was still missing the placement for the lamp, tree and mailbox. So I came up with a partial solution by putting a cutout of the sidewalk with gate on the other side of the street. Suddenly the composition rounded up nicely and there was place for lamp and tree.

Then I just refined the sketch and tried to put as many unique details from the board  as possible. Various decorations, signposts and patches of snow here and there.

The composition worked fine so I moved on into Blender for basic block out.

You can watch the process video on Youtube