Emerging tech Production -Creating the Environment

I wanted the artstyle to be simple but have a hand drawn and artsy quality.

To achive this I chose to keep most things more low poly and add more details with textures and animation.

I started out with making the central island where the camera is. It started out as a flatterned cylander and then I grabbed the edges and made it all wonky like a more natural land formation.

I then bought the top part up and shrunk it so it’d have sloped sides. Again to make it look like a somewhat natural island.

I then added the base of the scene as a big circle

I then decided to make the island more round so I extuded the top slight to add and extra layer.

I edited the vertexs to make it all more uneven.

At first I tried using a cube to make the islands around the edge but it was taking a long time and was too difficult and frustrating.

I instead just made a Big torus around the edge and used the “Grab” tool in “scupting” to mess with it and make it more odvious is land mass

I added a second circle over the base to be the water. You can see the edges of both here.

I added 5 short & wide cylanders to be the little islands for texture

I used different techniques to make each island look good.

The first one I did the same as the outside torus, using the gab too to manipulate it.

The second I Extruded and then scaled down the top multipel times to make a half dome, I then used the ‘grab tool’ in scuplting to make it less of a perfect circle.

Island 3:

I firsted added a face and moved it too teh side. I wanted this island to have a high point on one side and a big tree on the other.

I then used teh grab tool to make it more natural like below:

Island 4

I did the same as island three but with two hills!

Island 5:

I extruded and shrunk the top of the cylander island and then used the pen tool and drew a sausage around the edge.

I raised up the sausage and then bevled the edges.

I did some minor scuplting to make it look organic, and now I had an island with a bank around the edge!

and this is what the base of my scene looked like!

Next point was to animate the water

I had some troubles with it.

Word press won’t let me attach videos, but I used the Ocean modifer and it took me a while to work it out how to animate it.

It also changed my nice circle into a square, but its ok because the cliffs hide the weird corners from the camera’s view

I evetually worked it out, The thing I had the most issue with was making it loop, but once I found out how to access the graph editor I worked it out quickly, luckily.

I ended up duplicating the ocean and rotating it 90 degrees, to get it to have fun un directional waves, Just vibes not entirely realistic.

I then used a youtube tutorial to add some toony watery texture, it didn’t go entirely to plan, but atleast it’s not plain?

I next went to the main matrials for the next step.

I draw out textures and then tried to apply, at first it was too big so then I used a tutorial to off set it but it lost my fun drawings.

By just expanding the UV beyond the image I got a nice texture. I then repated that with stone and grass textures on all the islands

at the end it looked like this.
I had to do some extar unwrapping on all the islands but I think it works well.

I drew a tree and some bushes and then imported it into blender onto a plane. this was inspired by Marco Bucci’s 3d Diorama technique.

I then used a simular thing to add a lily pad for the frog I also added an animation of it bobbing up and down to match the water waves.

I then did that several more times for more lil pads to add into the environment.
As the ocean randomised in a pattern, I had to manually redo it every single lily pad, I couldn’t work out a method to automate it so I did it the tedious way.

I thought I would be done with the environment here; but I realised it was a bit empty.. like I should add more stuff, liven it up. So I decided on some quick plants to add.

First fo all more trees, I had a weeping willow in the concept art! of course I should add one.

It took a couple of attempts

This was my first, it just seemed sad and not like the majetic tree.

My second attempt I managed to make a lot fuller by breaking down the the shapes – clumps of leaves in this case – and working off of that.

I first put it on a lily pad but it took me so long to animated it with water so its the only one on a lily pad,

It looked pretty tho so I added more to different islands.

I then decided to attempt a water fall.. Very lazily.

Does it look goofy? yes, am I debating keeping it because of its goofiness, also yes.

I tried to add some foam and after a lot of trial and error it still looked wrong so I gave up.

So I made reeds in the water to add more greenery, using the same Drawing too plane technique