Presenting Outcomes 1

My overall idea was to recreate an artist's works in blender and then display it in a 3D manner. I decided to choose Mikael Gustafsson's piece - Small Memory. The reason I chose it was due to its stylized look and simple shapes. To start, I opened Blender and inserted the piece as a reference image to which to scale and colour the different elements and a camera object. I started with the mountains as they were fairly simple shape to replicate. I inserted a plane, rotated it to face the camera, and opened the shader editor to give it a gradient texture. I unplugged the Material Output node from the default Principled BSDF texture and replaced it with an Emission Shader instead. This was due to the fact that while Principled BSDFs had a lot of options to customise how light falls on the object, an emission is just simply a single coloured block. I plugged in a gradient node into the Shader and put a colour ramp between it. This let me customise the two colours and how the gradient looks. After I was done with the texture, I replicated the mountain, adjusting the texture and shape for each one.

My idea was to create a parallax effect - to give the sense of 'entering the piece of art'.  When the camera moves forwards through the scene, it will appear to be three dimensional despite it consisting of a series of 2D planes. I continued to complete the scene, adding foreground terrain and grass effects, again by inserting a plane and editing its vertices to fit the shape of the object. The upfront objects were all basically solid colours so the node setup was much simpler - using an emission shader plugged into the material output with the colour of the Emission BSDF set to dark blue. As I placed more and more objects, I layered them, moving the ones that look like they should be more distant further back. As for the grass, it was just a simple plane which was then subdivided and shaped into separate stems. I simply copied and pasted it across the front to add a grassy feel to the rocks in the foreground.

With the majority of the ground done, I moved onto the trees. The trees were very intricate and tedious to make as I had to hand drag each vertex to fit the outline of the tree. I finished the outline of two trees and duplicated them around the scene, fitting it to the original artwork. At the time, I had been looking at a fairly new addition to blender called the grease pencil. What this allowed you to do is draw on the 3D environment using a 2D pen. The drawn lines would then become 3D objects and could be moved or even animated by replacing them with each keyframe. So I decided to do some experimenting and started with a simple bird. Every second keyframe I drew it in a new position to create a simple looped animation of it flapping its wings. As the bird was now basically an object in the scene, I moved its ending position and keyframed it. This meant that the bird would not only flap its wings, but also slowly move off into the distance.

With the bird finished, I thought it would look really nice if I were to add a foaming effect to the banks of the river. So, once again, I used the grease pencil to outline the riverbank, I set the offset of the pencil to match the drawing surface position which meant that I drew directly onto the river instead of on one plane vertically in front of it. I curled the lines I was drawing to make them appear like foam. To animate it I simply added a noise modifier which allowed me to add randomisation of position, thickness and opacity to the lines at every keyframe. With the animation done and looking really good, I continued replicating the artwork, adding mountains, bushes, logs and so on. I was quite happy with how the scene was looking so to finish off, I added some bloom to make the neon of the sun really stand out.  This illuminated the entire scene, blending in the distant mountains into the golden sunlight.

With the scene finished, I added a wall with a rectangular hole and surrounding picture frame in front of my scene. This was to allow the camera to zoom in through to "enter" the artwork. I added a name plaque that read "Small Memory - Mikael Gustafsson" underneath it to make it feel like it was hanging in an art gallery. I then rendered the animation, and exported it for editing. With the Blender elements done, I moved onto Premiere Pro. I imported the clip and started by adding a slight blur effect when it transitioned from the gallery into the painting. I then moved on to adding sound. This included background chatter effects for the gallery, a swooshing sound for when the camera zooms into the painting and some calming music with water rippling when the camera pans through the scenery. At the end I added the Exhibition Hub logo and was done.