I've had a keen interest in Blender for some years now and seen it grow into a powerful tool for artists. It has many if not more features than some commercial programs, very intuitive to use and produces professional results. As an environment artist i'm interested if blender can be used to create convincing environments that equal the quality of what you see in the theatre.

What you on this page is one of my recent test projects, a very simple scene designed to support a few techniques i'd like to investigate and demostrate in blender. As you see in the scene i've created a simple sand dune and added three boxes. I did this in Blender with the basic of tools taking no more than 30 minutes to build. I began by positioning the squares in a simple but interesting composition, i then added a plane and subdivided this a few times and then sculpted this a little using the sculpt tools to form a basic dune shape, pulling the edges around the boxes to embed them more into the environment.

My aim for this scene is to set up a camera projection in blender, have the camera pan from left to right to show good parellax, but not too much to be unrealistic. I'm also thinking about adding some atmospheric effects like a dust storm. This could be quite fun, but not familiar with particles in Blender, and not too sure if that would push blender over the edge. We'll see how it goes. But for now i need to finish off the painting, split it up and project it into the scene.

For the next step I rendered off an ambient occlusion map in Blender and took that into photoshop as a base to start laying in textures. I use a website called CGtextures to source what i need. CGtextures is one of, if not the largest texture bank on the internet, and all free! I did a quick scan through for sand textures and something non discript for the blocks.

There was nothing complicated about this stage, i simple distorted the textures into position with reasonable perspective. Using the clone brush to extend the sand and add variation. Once i was happy with this i overlayed the sand onto the ambient occlusion render, this allowed the shadows from the render to show through into the sand, tying the two together a little more. Then, using a combination of stone textures and marble, i positioned and distorted them into place around the box, playing around with the curves to make them daker and lighter where they sit in the light or shade. After this was done i went in and brushed a little sand over the top and in the resesses to give them a little age.