Blender & Photoshop
Andrés Aponte teaches you how to integrate the free 3D app into your worldbuilding and visual development processes
Nowadays, 3D is becoming an essential part of the process for our pre-production, worldbuilding and concept art, including both realistic and stylised approaches. Free and friendly, I believe Blender is a perfect entry point for artists to get into 3D, especially those that have only dabbled in drawing and painting.
There are many ways Blender can be advantageous and speed up the concept process. There’s no way to replace the fundamental expertise though, and adding 3D tools to your artistic skill set can only enhance your knowledge of composition, light and storytelling. And of course that’s the fun part, since you’ll be able to focus mostly on the story or design of your piece.
Blender can be overwhelming at first, but the process of developing new skills will not only make you a better artist, but also expand your possibilities! In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how I combined Blender and Photoshop to help in the worldbuilding of my personal fantasy project Teyuna, inspired by the rural landscapes of Colombia, and pre-Columbian culture.
1 Sketch out the idea
For this project, I already have a story and world that I’ve been developing for some time. It’s inspired by rural and colonial architecture from Colombian towns and villages, but with a hint of fantasy elements to keep it unique. I prefer to explore shapes, proportions and architectural details by drawing digitally since I can create a large variety of different types of doors, windows or balconies, and then use that collection of assets to mix and match, and see what happens. It’s also generally a quick and fun ideation process to work through.
2 Draw the town layout
Again, I prefer to keep exploring the design process through sketching. I want to have a better idea of how to lay out this town. My goal is to recreate the feeling of a busy market plaza with a large church in the centre, which is a feature that you’ll commonly find in these sorts of settlements. This can also be a good time to test out some initial thumbnail compositions for the image.
3 Basic blocking
This is a similar approach to beginning any 3D model. Start by blocking out the basic shapes of the building with primitive objects like cubes. Getting the proportions right is the key to this part, and since we already have a 2D concept we can better adjust this to get it right early on. This is all done by scaling objects, and s
