Plan
This scene is a transitional shot between the can getting found in the forest and getting thrown into the van and the Can ending up inside the factory. I thought there need to be a short shot showing where the Can ends up.
Below is a still from the Previs of the van pulling up outside the factory. I liked the closeup shot to the back of the van with the camera then panning out to show the factory. I wanted to have similar motion with the camera.
References
As per, I gathered references that helped me decide what the factory would look like and the textures and colours etc.
Below is a screenshot of the images I had gathered and collated in PureRef
Modelling
I liked the composition of the previs so didn’t stray from that too much. The modelling aspect was very simple. They were a a series of cubes and cylinders that were extruded or inset for the doors.
The part that probably took the longest was the corrugated metal. It was just essentially a plane that I cut edges into and extruded those rectangle shapes or set inset into them.
Or there was the other type of corrugated steel, which I used for the garage doors.
For this I used a cube that I scaled to be quite flattened. Then added loop cuts and using proportional editing I pulled the middle edge out do make a curve doom like shape. On the last edge I extruded it to there was a gap between the curved shapes. I only had to do that once as then I used the Array Modifier to duplicate that shape to make a corrugated effect.
The Buildings where just cubes and I used the same technique that I used for creating the windows in the terrace houses.
Below I added a dirt ground texture from PolyHaven as well as a HDRI. I was influenced by the colours I saw in the reference that I gathered
I wasn’t super happy with the scene, but like most of my scenes, I went away to work on a different scene and came back to it at a later date.
Once I had time away working on the other scene, I thought that the image above was quite drab and didn’t fit the colours that I had in the other scenes. I thought because the piece is stylised, I can be way more bold and creative with the colours. So as many of my scenes had pink tones and the Dutty Juice Can was pink, I thought I might as well be bolder and just make the metal pink.
I much preferred this and started to texture using peeling metal material from AmbientCG. I experimented with the texture with a noise texture in the shader editor, which was plugged in to the Factor of the Mix shader (show below). I liked this effect as it meant that some spots had the peel and some did not depending on the noise textures influence.
The finishing touches were to add a fence around the parameter of the site. I got the fence from PolyHaven. Then I got a texture for the ground with was a pebble effect. As I had done for my other scenes I subdivided the ground plane and added a Displace Modifier and used the Displacement Map to create a bump.
For my River Scene and Forest Scene, I had added pine trees using planes, so I imported the ones I had already made and repeated that process.
I changed the HDRI to something much brighter and had a sunset ambience which I already had been reflecting in the other scenes.
I also wanted to add a bit of grass so the same grass from that I used in the river scene, I imported in to this scene,
Animation
For the Forest Scene I had purchase a van and customised it to have the Dutty Juice Labels on it. So I just imported that same customised van into this scene and because its rigged, by going into pose mode, I could animate the motion. And the good thing about it was that when I moved it forward the wheels rolled. I just did a simple animation that started off with the van just moving forward and turning in to the factory site. But then I also added slight forwards and backwards shacking when the van braked and sided to side shaking when the van when up on the curb.
The great thing about my purchase of the Van was that it also came with massive containers that I thought would actually suit the scene seeing as it was a factory. So I placed the containers on the site to make it seem less sparse.
Final Renders and Thoughts
There was a few issues with the render, firstly, just like the other scenes, I had to do that long thing were I changed the version of Blender to fix the texture issues. However, the render farm needs to know exactly where the textures are located in which folder. However, somewhere, something has gone wrong where I have not set the textures in the folder correctly, as some of the object have come out a magenta colour. When that happens, that means that the textures could not be found. So the grass and the containers have that error. By the time I had rendered it, it was too late to re- render, so it is definitely something I need to fix for later on. But for the show, I didn’t have enough time.
I also wish I added a bit more to the scene, like a bit of foggy mist like in the previs. It suggests that there is pollution from the factory. I think it would have made the scene look a bit better. Plus, although I believe the trees were need to cover the emptiness of the background, they don’t look quite right to me. I think I should have found a HDRI with trees, but the last one I found didn’t suite the scene.
I also should have duplicated the vans so there would have been more parked up.
I think with those changes I would be a bit happier with this scene. But it still serves its purpose as a transitioning shot.