[Art] Oat Pi Alleyway~!!

Hey y’all,

Welcome to the Alleyway located between the “Films & Photography” and the “Acting & Drama” Buildings at Oat Pi University, where Kareen does what she can to “help” Bill. ; )

With this one I decided to update the existing Oat Pi University Outdoor scene with this new area, taking advantage of the common props, like benches, lights and trees that make it up, letting me make it feel like the same area (because it is!).

I also added the models from the original scene, only to run into a minor problem. Everything was the wrong size. The steps were half a metre tall, the chairs were huge, and everything else was a bit off. It was all over the place.

I ended up remodelling a lot of this area, cutting in new details, and making sure everything was the correct size. The new background looks similar to the original, but everything in the final scene has proportions similar to the real world. 

But why was that a big deal to do?

Since I started working on backgrounds for Buka, real world sizes help with scaling characters in the scene.

We have a height image of all our characters, which we use to track consistency between different characters in CG Scenes. Now we’re using it to map the heights of characters into the backgrounds too.

This makes a huge difference in figuring out where the camera can go, since it has to be in a “physical space”. The end result is an accurate background that matches Buka’s CG characters nicely.

What’s even cooler is that Oat Pi University is slowly being modelled out into a full University. I’m not sure if this is a good idea, but it has encouraged me to learn better ways of working in Blender, like organizing it to edit easier, and optimizing the scene for rendering (from hours to minutes).

But what do you think? Let me know in the comments.

~ Zuri Sama ~