Developing Blender Into My Workflow

Since going down the concept art route from my illustration background, I’ve been trying to develop more 3D workflows into my own process. Obviously 3D can be utilised in many ways within concept art, but I’ve always struggled to make it benefit my process, previously it’s either been quicker to do in 2D (for me at least!) or the end result hasn’t looked the way that I wanted it to. So I’m going to share one of the ways that I’ve used 3D which has really enhanced my own work and the way that I approach it. 

Before going into 3D

First of all, this is all in relation to using Blender, I tried Maya and it just wasn’t for me, so I’ve stuck with Blender ever since! There’s quite a few artists on Youtube that I follow who provide Blender tutorials and one of those is Grant Abbitt who has some really easy to follow videos with some nice stylised tutorials too. One of the ones I followed was his sea shack tutorial that you can find below (this is just the first video in a series of videos).

Once I’ve done a tutorial I like to put it in to practice in my own way though, doing a tutorial is great but only if you’re learning something rather than just copying steps, you have to be able to replicate it in your own work. I decided to do my own little pirate shack, just for practice, and started out with some concepts. I personally usually need to work out an idea in 2D before jumping into 3D and I knew that would be way more efficient for me, so I came up with 5 ideas:

Normally in this situation, I would spend a fair bit of time refining the idea and making sure the idea is 100% solid. Seeing as it was just to test the process though, I picked the one I liked and moved forward with it. I am a firm believer that when you’re trying to learn something you should try to learn one thing at a time, so the focus was on the workflow rather than the design. Here’s the one I picked:

Onto the 3D

I started to block it out in 3D and after having done a fair few stylised Blender tutorials I’m definitely starting to pick up common tips and tricks to quickly making primitives look stylised. This involves things like bevelling the edges, creating a lot of wonkiness, and avoiding too many straight edges. Obviously stylisation is a lot more than that! I just personally found these were quick tricks that also aligned with the way I stylise work. I didn’t really do much past modeling the concept, other than adding in lights and some water that has the right translucency and reflections. The whole idea behind this was to follow a process similar to what Elodie Mondoloni uses, so using the same steps but approaching each step in my own way. The complete model ended up looking like this (I left the models roughness and base colours alone, but the barrels imported with roughness and base values from a different model I’d done).

The Paintover

Once I’d got my model, I imported the ID pass and combined pass into Photoshop (yes you can do it with just these two passes!), one mistake I did make though was not properly combining objects so my ID pass is a mess, don’t do this!Now this is where it gets really fun and can be painted up to a finished standard in a couple of hours (depending on the size and complexity of the model of course!). You could also spend more time in 3D and need to do less painting, as you can see my model is very low poly, but I knew it would be quicker for me to paint this out than spend more time modeling. I used my ID pass to make selections of anything that I wanted to be a certain colour (for example certain planks, or the leaves on the tree etc.). For each separate component, I then used a gradient map to lay down base colours (on a new layer per component, you can also do this by painting in a flat colour and changing the layer mode but gradient maps will provide more dynamic colours and shadows. This step will take a bit of playing around with and it’s important to make sure you’re fairly happy with this before moving onto painting. This is what it ended up looking like once all of the gradient maps were in:

Once my colours were done, I painted away until it was complete! I used one of Dave Greco’s brushes which has some really nice texture to it for the majority of the paintover. The main thing in the paintover stage was for me to firstly paint out the 3D, removing a lot of the hard edges, cutting back into the 3D model itself and also painting in the different materials (with the aid of reference). I also tried to push certain elements to make them pop like adding more of a gradient to each leaf on the tree, fish in the water and some stylisation to the water reflections. Overall I think it turned out pretty well and I definitely learned a lot. This was one of the first times where I’ve actually had a lot of fun using 3D in my process and actually understand how to replicate it again within other designs. 

This was just a test, so things have been missed and aren’t of the highest quality, both of the shacks are absolutely pitch black inside which was a missed opportunity, so I may go back to that in the future. I also forgot to paint in the fish hung from the wooden poles, but it did get to a point where I knew that I’d learned what I needed to and it would be more efficient to try this technique on a fully fleshed out and finished piece next. 

Looking forward to doing more of this in the future and finding new workflows to add to this, if you have any questions regarding this process, feel free to get in touch!