Overview of the silhouettes of the moving boxes.

Working in Blender

Blender is amazing! It makes it so much easier to work fast and efficient compared to what I used to use. For me, Blender works perfectly for these kinds of productions. Within Blender I have altered almost all the shortcuts and made the program my own; this makes it super fast to produce assets.

I didn’t use a lot of fancy tricks for this environment but I used a few techniques that would be fun to explain: For the attic itself (so the wooden frame) I used tiling textures, these look great because you can push a lot of detail when a texture is tiled. This is a very common thing in environment production. The downside of tiling textures is that normal maps won’t work very well on edges. Without this normal map, edges can look really “cheap” and not very “next-gen”. To make the edges still look good I used “custom vertex normals”. This technique costs a bit more polygons but comparing that to the cost of an extra normal map just for the edges is nothing, especially in this time and day where polys are no longer the bottleneck but draw-calls are. The technique itself is very simple. Vertex normals, or often called just “normals” are used to direct shading/lighting on a 3D model. (I am not talking about normal maps) Custom vertex normals are normals that face exactly the same way as the face itself. If you add a bevel between two faces the light falls really nice over this edge.