The Street

Inspiration
This is perhaps becoming a little bit of a habit, but the tone I was aiming to achieve with this project was inspired once again by Stray. The work of Maxim Dorokhov and Nicolas Millot is amazing, and the quality of their art is something I aspire to achieve one day. That’s a very ambitious goal, I know, but it’s good to aim high.

The use of props, textures and lighting used throughout Stray creates an amazing atmosphere that is cosy in some places, and threatening in others. The moods that can be invoked with these elements is something I’d love to be able to capture in my own work.

Props
Filling the scene with a healthy amount of objects was a high priority, as this helps to create a sense of life and activity. Life is generally chaotic, busy and full of things (which is a very broad generalisation and depends on a whole host of factors), so I knew I’d need to get into the modelling zone once again. I could probably find everything I could ever need online somewhere, but I get a lot of satisfaction from creating as much as I can myself. If nothing else, doing things the hard way is ultimately a great way to keep learning how to model and texture.

Items that I’d gathered from other sources include the soldier and the plant. I haven’t ventured into character modelling/sculpting or any organics yet, so this was my compromise. Everything else I had made for the scene the old fashioned way, pushing vertices around (the best bit). Props used include: a dumpster, TV, chairs, crates, AC units, signs, a table, a Mahjong set, bottles, glasses, light fittings, corrugated panels, a security camera, paper lanterns, shelves and plant pots (plus a bunch of cables and pipes).

Textures
The next important part of capturing the right mood/atmosphere and grounding the location in reality was choosing and creating a variety of textures. Over the last couple of years, I have developed my skills with creating materials to a decent level, but this project really benefitted a lot from me discovering the BlenderKit add-on. What an absolute find. For most things, I’m perfectly happy to create a texture to suit the subject, but there are still plenty of textures that are beyond me; this is where BlenderKit came in. This allowed me to get high quality textures very quickly, and gave me more time to concentrate on the creative direction of the scene, modelling and lighting. I mean, check out that cobbled floor. A thing of beauty.

Lighting

The final theme, and possibly the most important was lighting the scene. Lighting can be used to create the mood, highlight important elements, or hide others and enables everything within the scene to hang together. The collection of props and materials may all begin their lives independently of one another, but the lighting is quite literally cast across all of those elements, inherently bringing them together into the same, shared environment.

With Stray as my main reference point, it was pretty much guaranteed that halogen lighting with a slightly green/blue cast and some form of colourful neon would be used. I’m partial to neon lights/signage in reality, so it’s always nice to bring some of that into my artwork too. Other lights were introduced to add a little more variety to the colour scheme, and also to emphasise some key areas around the composition