For our blender classes, we were tasked with copying a simple image that we had to find online and recreating it within blender as a full scene. Our goal with this lesson was to learn animating and camera movement, which is why we were tasked to make the scene simple.
I started off by searching for references that we wanted to use in our scene. I have come out of a Dungeons and Dragons game that was western themed, so with my western inspired high still going, I decided that I wanted to make a lonesome salloon in the middle of nowhere, with small elements around it that I could easily animate, like cacti swinging in the wind, a tumbleweed rolling through and the sand under the building obscuring the vision.
So I started off by modeling the Saloon. I had primarily used the first image as my reference for this building, as I had the easiest time seeing what needed and needn't be added to the building.
To keep the scene as simple as possible, I only added 4 windows on the front of the saloon while keeping the back blank. I was planning on covering up the back of the saloon with a mountain of sand, giving it a forgotten feel to the entire scene. To cut on time, I also used the array modifier to copy both the windows and the doors, without needing to tediously do it by hand.
Alongside that, I blacked out the doorway as to not give too much detail on the inside of the building. The shot was primarily on the outside and even with a moving camera, I wouldn't want to be giving the saloon more time than I already had.
Next came the cactus.
I made it by starting off with a circle. This circle I extruded a few times while spinning the Axis of it slightly to give the cactus a more rigid look. After I was happy with the shape of it, I gave it some arms using the same technique.
After the shape of the cactus was done, I made a tiny spike next to it and I used the Scatter on surface effect to give it the spikes that is desperately needed. After tweaking the settings a bit to make the spikes look random but not eye-bleed crazy, I finished off the cactus and I continued on with the tumbleweed.
That is, until we got some horrible news during our next class. Because my class' work speed being too slow, the teacher decided to scrap the animation and camera movement part of the class, and she announced that we only needed to hand in the scene. Due to this horrible news, I didn't end up making the tumbleweed as it would have been one of my main animation focuses of the entire scene.
I did, however, make the land that the saloon and the cactus would sit upon. I didn't want it to be generic and I wanted it to be easy to fly around it with the camera (before we got told that we won't be animating), so I turned it into an island with a rock on top of it, which i planned to put the saloon under.
After I was done with the island, I threw everything together, I gave everything a basic color, i put the camera into the position I wanted it to be, I added a sun to give an indication of sorts that it was beaming down on the scene and I rendered it when it was done.
