Garden Explorers behind the scenes!

Hello! I thought it would be fun to do a behind the scenes look at my latest project.

This was my first real attempt at making an outdoors scene which provided an interesting challenge compared to pretty much everything I've done in blender. Here's an overview of the whole scene:

The bricks were a large part of the time spent on this. They started out as simple rectangles with a large part of the deal down to height maps and textures, but i wanted visible bumps to appear to give them a rougher appearance on the edges where textures couldn't add.

I made loop cuts around the sides of the bricks and used a mix of the randomize tool and manual sculpting to give them physical deformations. (the closest bricks to the camera being a lot more detailed)

The hose and string both use one of my favorite things to mess around with using a combination of the array and curve modifiers to create a repeating surface that follows a curve you can drag around the scene.

This is super useful for creating anything that is curved and have it easily editable afterwards.

This was also what i used to create the christmas lights in my previous project!

The little toy car in the background was actually supposed to be what the string was wrapped around instead of the hose (which was added pretty much right at the end) but i wasnt completely happy with the model and felt the hose fit better with the rest of the scenery. But i didnt want the model to go to waste so i just stuck it off to the side. This is what it looks like up close.

Here's an early version of the render with the car in place of the hose, and also the character on the string looks quite different! I wasn't happy with them so I went back and redid their face and arms. 

I ended up poking a hole in them with the knife tool and making the string go through it. I think it looks very good in the 4k version, but the 768p version I posted on twitter i feel like it isnt very visible so next time I want small details like that to be more visible.

On that note, did you notice both of the paper characters have a bit of smudging on the ink and transparency as if they had gotten wet from rain? I had a lot of fun doing that even if it is very subtle. It was all just done in photoshop and a translucent shader on the material but i think it works really well. Especially where you can see the string a bit behind the 2nd character.

As a finishing touch over everything I put a volume around the whole scene with a very thin density, just to give it all a slight fogginess and add to the atmosphere. It also brightened things up a bit giving light more chance to bounce around the scene, although at the cost of it practically tripling render times.

Overall, I am very happy with the end result. The project went through a lot of changes over the course of me working on it, as tends to happen with this stuff for me. (i don't do much planning beforehand hgfhghg) Thanks for reading!