Creating the Environment | Roll to the Beat DevLog 3

In the third devlog of my animated short film Roll to the Beat, I start building the world the characters live in. I call it the garden. Luckily, the whole story takes place in one location.

I made the garden with Blender's ANT Landscape add-on: a lake first, since most of the story happens around a flower near a pond, and then some cartoony hills around it. Shading gave me trouble, and for most of the week it looked more like a desert. In the end I went with green ground, a grass particle system, and brown trails painted with texture paint.

I used the grease pencil to map out the story beats. Along the way, I found a mound that's perfect for the ladybugs' poker game on a tin-can table. I modeled the flower from a Bezier curve stem, a squashed sphere for the bud, and an array of petals. The poker chips, cards and shovel came from online asset sites.

I'm also testing a painterly look for the backgrounds, inspired by Open Season and the artist Eyvind Earle, while the characters stay cartoony.

Watch the third devlog of my short film Roll to the Beat on YouTube.