Let’s be real: building a big scene can be quite a daunting task since a world has a variety of things: setting, weather, architecture, scale, shading, and camera angles, to name a few, and building one means taking care of all of these. But that does not mean everything has to be done together at the same time.

Break your scene up and take it one step at a time. While working with big scenes, gathering your references first can sure be a very big time saver. My main mantra while approaching such scenes is plan carefully then create freely.

For this one, as I mentioned, I wanted to go with the Lara Croft and Uncharted vibes; hence, to make things easier, I collected some in-game screenshots from the games as a part of my initial references. When working, I like to break my reference board up into four sections for better clarity: First, a section containing overall references and inspirations for the environment; second, for the lighting; third, for the style of materials/textures; and fourth, for the architectural elements (if present).

For gathering references, I find Pinterest to be really helpful, whereby you get a wide variety of references and inspirations sourced from the web, which I can then save and create boards for any of my projects and keep things well organized. Apart from that, I also use PureRef for referencing.

Another practice that I found helpful while starting any environment is to ask a few questions regarding the world in question. What is the overall theme/vibe I want to go for? What type of architectural elements do I want to show? What was the purpose of this place? Is it a peaceful sanctuary? A place of worship? If the character is on a ledge, how did the character get there? Is it via stairs? Or does the character have to climb up? Such questions help to make your approach a lot more purposeful rather than entirely imaginative. It is very important to ground your worlds in reality, no matter how dystopian or fantastical. That helps you sell the believability of the environment.

Once everything was set, I finally started the referencing process by arranging inspirations/references appropriate to my scene into separate boards on Pinterest and PureRef.

Blockout & Modeling

Like many of my previous projects, this one also started off with a rough blockout to get a look and feel of the environment before I got to the detailing, texturing, and all the other good stuff. But even before the blockout, we need to sort out the composition for the scene.

The composition can be very useful in terms of selecting the camera angles and placement of key components of the scene, such as characters, important details, props, and much more, in a manner that directs our eyes toward them. I personally like using the rule of thirds or the golden ratio, depending on the scene. In this case, Blender’s camera composition guides (which can be found under the Viewport Display tab) come very handy, giving the user a wide range of guides to choose from for their scenes.