Work Process

Caverns, underground lakes, shimmering lichen and fireflies. Torchlight casting strange flickering shadows on the uneven surfaces of the rock, each layer of sediment another ancient history lost to time. I love caves. The mystery inherent to them and the solitude. It was the most obvious choice to me, when my classmates and I were tasked to create a 3D environment for a class in university. But I didn’t just want to make a cave. As a an avid D&D player my thoughts drifted to the Underdark, a terrifying underground world filled with danger and beauty. I also considered making a club before being so daring and simply combining the two ideas, creating the best possible place that could exist in this world. A cave club.

For this project I finally got the chance to figure out Blender some more, something that at that point I had wanted to do for a long time already. The project itself started how it usually does: with a moodboard. Most things were already clear to me here. So I managed to jump into the project quite fast and started blocking out a rough outline of the environment. It needs to be mentioned that for this project we were given a scene with camera movement. So we had to plan and animate our layout around it. There were also consideration splaced upon the entrance and exit of the scene, since mine and all the other animations would be chained in the end, transitioning seamlessly into one another.

After finishing the blockout I started refining my scene adding light and models to the environment until I was satisfied. The fog and mushroom lights were very important for me to get right, since they were the main focus of the animation. Then I was ready to render! Sadly this took me forever. Per frame I calculated a render time of ten to fifteen minutes. With three hundred frames total it was … a lot. But regardless the finished product turned out better than expected.