August - Progress so far

For August, instead of making an image that makes fun of British Summer, I am instead producing a holiday scene on a beach, including palmtrees, and a plane in the sky.

First of all, I shall go through how my plane was made:



Following an online tutorial, the first thing I did was create a cylinder and adjust some settings, then extruding the wings from the cylinder. The tutorial I followed was on how to make a low-poly airplane, however I followed it slightly differently to make a model based on a commercial airline plane.



The next thing I did was to adjust the shape of the wings as I saw fit, making it look slightly more accurate to a real airplane.

Then, going in a completely different direction to the tutorial I was following, I chose to make the main body smoother using the Meshsmooth modifier. Applying it to the whole object makes the whole thing smooth, making it look more like a shark than an airplane, so what I did next was clone the plane, deleting the wings from one copy and deleting the body from the other.



As shown in this render, I also attempted to add windows to the plane using a material I created on Photoshop. Initially I had difficulty with this, as you can see the windows are not in the correct positions, all stacked on top of each other making it look like a double or triple decker airbus with slanted windows.

Eventually however, I was able to correct the problem by using UVW map settings to place the materials on the plane correctly.



As shown in the render I have also added a logo to the tail fin using the same UVW map settings, and made the plane's engines in a similar fashion to the main body. The plane is now finished.

The next object I created for the image is a palmtree.



For this I started out by making a cone, and then using the Array tool to stack several copies of it on top, and then using the bend modifier to... well, bend it. Next a leaf was drawn using the line tool and then extruding the shape, and again the Array tool was used to create four more copies of the leaf. All four were then placed on top of the tree.

At the moment, this is what the image looks like:



The sand an sea were both made with two completely different cylinders, and the islands in the distance are simply green spheres. Two other new objects were added as well: a beach ball, created using a sphere and materials, and a shark. Rather then create a whole fullt 3D shark, I just used the line tool to create the fin. Also, the background was made in Photoshop, using gradients and a lens flare effect.

For those who are curious, this is what the scene looks like from a distance:


Yes, the plane is actually nearer to the beach than the shark is. You wouldn't have thought that, would you?