Reference

Plenty of references and some concept art is what I preferably want to collect before even blocking out a scene. Recently, I really started to admire the old masters’ landscape paintings and I already had a folder full of reference. I just picked one I really liked and wouldn’t mind working on for a while because these projects require some time investment and I didn’t want to give up halfway through.

I think most of us know what it’s like to have a drive full of unfinished project folders, and I was really done with that. My new mindset is to actually finish what I start and I hope it will stick!

The painting ‘Mill at Charenton’ by François Boucher had all the elements I was looking for and looked beautiful, it had the house as a centerpiece and plenty of foliage the creation of which I wanted to learn more about.

I created a reference board with PureRef which had sections with all the elements I needed for the scene. I spent hours on Google researching different parts of the environment. This step is probably the most important and should not be rushed.

Blockout of the Scene

The blockout phase is really simple, the entire scene is just one mesh with one material created in Maya. I exported it out so that I had something really quickly, within an hour usually, in Unreal Engine.