This scene is the key establishing shot on the film. I wanted it to be a corner shop on a quintessentially British street. This is the simple scene I modelled in Maya for the Pre-vis consisting of cubes and cylinders. I liked the sun hit the scene to give that sunset effect.
This is the scene where I probably gathered the most reference images. I made a mood board for not only the street itself but the look of different shops
These moodboards where extremely helpful when it came to giving me ideas about textures, colours, lighting, composition and how exactly the models should look.
Street Objects
I know I could of brought the assets but there was an aesthetic I wanted to maintain and more than that, I really enjoy modelling and wanted to concentrate on that as I would like to do that as a career.
The first thing I started to do for the scene was to model the objects for the street. I thought it would be a nice start to practice my modelling skills before I got to modelling the buildings.
So I started gathering image for the street objects, even taking pictures on my phone of things I’d see outside. On of the first objects I saw was a bin, and one of the easiest to model. This consisted of cubes and a pyramid shapes.
Another very simple one was the bollard, consisting of a cylinder and using the extrude tool.
I also modelled a cone, also made up of a cylinder, however, this was a bit trickier to go from the cone shape to the squarer shape at the bottom which required me to manipulate the verts.
The lamp post was actually probably the trickiest. It was made up of several shapes. The light itself and the cap part of the light were made up of spheres. Then the curved pole at the top was made up of a cylinder and I used the Bend tool in Maya to create a the curve shapes. The bottom part was made up of 4 planes that I stitched together with an arch shape at the top.
The bus stop ended up being quite easy as it was just a cylinder cut in half and placed on cube shapes. I also modelled a screen that sometimes is seen next to bus stops that plays adverts. George suggested that it would be like a funny easter egg to include my last project in to this scene. I really liked this idea and thought the screen next to the bus stop would be the easiest way.
I also modelled a telephone poll which again was very simple. The main shape was made out of cylinder and the other shapes where cubes.
The traffic lights were not too hard but difficult to make the topology flow well. The pole was of course again a cylinder then the lights itself were a cube shape and I extruded the three light sections.
The buildings
Once I had modelled the majority of the objects that would be in the street, I started modelling the buildings. I was worried about the difficulty of it but actually because I wanted the corner shop and the street to be made up of terrace housing, it was essentially cubes and planes.
The main corner shop itself was two cubes, one for the first floor and the one for the ground floor which was the shop itself. The bottom part I removed one of the corners and extruded inwards to create the door.
I also added details like the 1960s retro patterned wall. That started life again as a cube that I subdivided and scaled down and moved the edges to be like one “wing” then used the mirror tool to make four, then duplicated to create the complete wall.
For the windows I was a bit unsure so followed a few tutorials including the one below. It ended up being quite simple, mainly a series of insets and extrusions.
This is a video of how the scene looked in Maya
At this point I had done a lot of my other project in Blender and knew that I could achieve the effect I needed in Blender and there was more videos and blogs online that were catered for Blender, so for that reason, I exported my models from Maya and imported them into Blender.
Here I added a HDRI I had found and started to play around with the lighting
Below I had exported the objects from Maya and started placing them into my scene.
Below is how all the object looked within the scene without the textures. For the rest of the street I just duplicated the terrace houses that I had already made and just lined them up.
Textures
I had found a tutorial for make a TV screen texture in Blender. So used this to help me create a procedural texture
Below shows a screenshot of the shader editor and how I ended up making that warped effects, by using an emission shader and separating the RBG colours using colour ramp nodes.
I really loved this effect and not sure if it would have looked right without it.
Below is a screenshot of some of the procedural textures I created for the buildings. By this point it was coming to the end of the project so I was getting used to creating textures so I had just started experimenting with what I could do. To achieve the look of worn down painted plaster, damaged by the elements, is using a material from AmbientCG, then, because the original colour was white, but I wanted it pink, I used the Screen blending mode and plugged that into the Base Colour. then using a Mix Shader, I added another Principled BSDF Shader that had a noise texture plugged into the Factor, which gave that lighter worn out effect
Below is a screenshot of just the noise texture without the colour, demonstrating the use of the noise texture
Below is a screen shot of one of the final touches I did to the scene. This included adding wires coming out of the telephone pole which was done just by adding verts.
I also added extra objects into the scene from SketchFab and PolyHaven that I didn’t have time to model. this included a rubbish bin (not the black litter bins) some rubbish bags and the Aircon on the outside of the shop.
Camera Animation
I had three cameras in the scene for the three shots. One for the first shot of the street, one for the pan away from the bus stop ad, and one by the shop door.
These were the final renders
Final thoughts
I actually really liked how the scene turned out and I liked the experimenting I did with the modelling and procedural textures. I probably spent the mode time with this scene overall, especially with the time researching and collecting reference is accounted for. However, there were still so many things I wanted to include. I wanted cars coming up and down the street to give it a little bit more life. I also had the idea of having some one coming out of the shop to leave the door open, as an introduction to the interior of the store. I really wanted to practice doing most of the modelling so I knew I had to sacrifice something.
Something that I would like to do for later is add the signage and these other details I said above. Also things like dirt and graffiti would have been the last touch, but with all the issues I had rendering it ended up taking up time changing scenes and ate some of my time away. However, I think I still like the outcome.