Barn Environment Study
In early spring of 2022, I walked around my neighborhood to find this old picturesque barn. Given I had easy access to it for reference, I was inspired to convert it into my own digital rendition. The scene was created and rendered in Blender, and is more so an environment study than a production-ready game level.
Reference
Since I had easy access to the barn, I walked around part of the perimeter and got a couple of reference photos, as well as some base measurements of the structure so that I can easily match the blockout in Blender. I included a couple close ups of particular details, though not all were used in the final composition.
Blockout
After getting the base measurements, I started with some basic cubes in Blender just to match the proportions. Then I alternated between elaborating on the structure and blocking out the surrounding vegetation to give it a sense of place.
Construction
Once I felt satisfied with the general feel of the environment, I focused on breaking the barn blockout into parts and assembling a more detailed structure. I began to utilize more of the closeup reference photos to design smaller details like the windows and doors.
The Barn Material
I made an intentional decision to steer away from a traditional UV/Texturing workflow in favor of a fully procedural material pipeline. This would probably not pan out well for a larger-scale production, but worked pretty good for a self-contained project. Here’s a breakdown of the material I used for the majority of the structure.
Ground Foliage
For the ground vegetation I utilized Blender’s particle system to generate instances of grass clumps. I made several clump variations, each ranging in shape and scale, to not make the vegetation seem too uniform.
The Backdrop
The vegetation assets in the background are extremely simplistic in order to create a smooth hierarchy of detail, with the barn structure being the primary focal point of the composition. The skybox is a procedural gradient with a series of noises applied to create the illusion of a dense forest beyond the tree line.
Final Rendering
As is the case for most of my compositions, the final lighting stage makes up the majority of my time on this piece. I iterated on the general lighting setup over the course of blockout and construction, but saved the final touches until the camera placement was finalized.
