In this scene I want the can to look like it had ended up in the middle of a forest, again showing the impact of rubbish in the environment.
These are the images from the Previs. It is just a person picking up the can and throwing it into the back of a van. The van will drive off to the factory
References
So I started to gather references again in PureRef. I wanted to have this forest floor with lush ferns surrounding it.
Modelling
The references were super helpful. I was able to quickly model the forest floor by subdividing the mesh of a plane and using the verts of the plane and proportional editing to make the floor uneven. The using the Displace Modifier and a displacement map from a texture I got from AmbientCG. I was able create this rocking/mossy floor.
If I had time, I would have loved to model some plants, but for time reasons I decided to download the model from PolyHaven. I modelled a couple of different varieties of big and small rocks using the the landscape addon. I used the weight paint tool to show exactly where I wanted the rocks and ferns to go on the landscape. I left part in blue for just the rocks, so it looked like there was a clearing. I downloaded a log and a tree stump too and place that in the scene.
From there it was super easy. I just placed a HDRI of a forest into the scene and added a warm sun light to match the lighting in my other scenes. I also selected the verts on the plane closest to the camera and subdivided that area again. This is so that part looks super detailed without having to subdivide the whole plane.
I also added the pine trees that I used for the river scene.
I downloaded a van from Sketch Fab. I re-created the Dutty Juice label in Adobe Illustrator and used the UV map on the van to replace the texture it came with.
Animation
I used two cameras in the scene. One at the floor of the forest that panned up from the floor to the can. And another camera facing the rig and the van.
I downloaded a rig from Blender Studios. It was really simple animation of just the feet and hands. I went into pose mode and just used the controls to move the hands feet and torso.
Render Issues
I had loads of issues with rendering this scene. Because the rig I got was only compatible with Blender 3.5 and above, I could do the thing where I convert my file and to a older version for render farm. However, I tried several times to render on the university computers and some how they ended up looking like the renders below.
I didn’t work out what the issues was in the end. So ended up using the render farm. But of course it meant that the shader editor was messed up. It meant that the visibility of the tree planes were messed up and the plants came out white. By this point I had very little choice but to go with the scene so it could be used in the fmp.
Final Thoughts and Renders
I was really happy with the scene in Blender but after it was rendered it did look really different. It is something that I will definitely change for the future and update the scene. I will also continue to work on the character animation. But in terms of the story, I think the scene was able to still tell a story of the can being picked up and taken away to the factory.