Reasons why scenary is still important to any scene/theme.

 

This blog may not appeal to a lot of people who are accustomed to reading my other material since this blog will be briefly discussing the importance of scenery. Now some of you may know or have notice that scenery is very important to me and every single scene I create except for character profiles where I tend to neglect scenery and just render on a black background so that the character is the center of attention. I always make sure that I spend a lot of time fixing up environments. Daz studio offers a lot of interesting environments you can buy that are already set up with furniture, props, and all those nice things for characters to make use of. 

I tend to remove everything out of an environment and then replace it with other items and furniture. I've been told many times that I am one of the best environment designers when it comes down to these sort of things. I especially have a knack for doing this with out door environments as well. I will try to use various different buildings to build my own unique city out of them so that none of my environments look like the same environments everyone else is using.

 The thing about scenery is that a lot of artist will neglect it because they have zero interest at all in making sure that the scene is complimenting the characters. In the world of 3D it's understandable if people are forced to do this to reserve memory or they just don't have the space on their computer that will render both the character and the environment including a small environment. Then you have artist that are just flat out lazy as hell and neglect environment and scenery because they just want to rush into creating explicit content or basic pinups. But of course laziness and the lack of memory on one's computer aren't the only reasons why some artist don't care for scenery. I will include those reasons in the cons of creating environments at the end of this blog.

The reason why scenery is important is because it really helps the theme stand out better than a scene that does not have a background at all. Some people want to know what type of theme you're aiming for, without a background it can be difficult to visualize what the artist is trying to present with just the character alone. Though it is not impossible to still tell a story without a background or environment at all because I've seen this done several times before. I've been doing digital art for awhile and scenery was always important to me because without it...

Environment in games like clock tower truly proved exactly why scenery is so important, valuable, and can make for a greater experience. There were so many eerie things going on, that the game didn't even need music to create a sense of tension or fear. Just the environment and dead silence alone was enough to create this feeling of dread and terror. A lot of games that came after it borrowed elements from it.

A scene with just a character preset and nothing else there (not including profiles, character sheets, etc these are exceptions) the image will be quite boring. I had this conversation before with a 2D artist I know named Allesey, I asked him several times why did he always neglect adding backgrounds for his characters. I believe he told me that he didn't like creating them which doesn't necessarily means that he's lazy but some people that intentionally avoid creating a scene certainly is lazy. In his case they weren't necessary to what he wanted to do with his work. 

So I shrugged it off like, well okay I understand but your work would look ten times more interesting if there was a scene included was just my input on the matter. People that specialize in interior or exterior designing know very well why environment development is important both in films, game design, television, and so forth.

 Scenery if done correctly and not just quickly slapped together can attract just as much attention from the viewer as the character preset in the scene. I tend to look at art with no scene as rather boring and dull because I love to see what other artist can come up with. This is mostly an issue among 3D artist but not so much of an issue with 2D artist that draw for a living. 

Maybe some artist feel that scene production is a waste of time, whatever their reasons are for neglecting a scene a person will know what a theme is if the character is dressed up in Halloween clothing, or wearing Christmas related attire. They will know that the theme is intended to reflect one of those two Holiday seasons...However, such a theme that's lacking in background to make the theme truly stand out wouldn't be as interesting if the character was placed inside a well thought out environment and scene for them to become a part of.

This is a dark city at night with a train station I created (can't see the train part of it). Took several hours since this isn't a pre-built environment. I actually did all this myself. It can get time consuming as hell, and is not always the fun part either. Most people can't handle environments this size and render them on their machine. There is a massive city if I pulled the camera out you would be shocked to see how many buildings there really are, tunnels, and various streets I created. I forgot to put my name on these. 😅

Here is another section of the city I created. This city is known as Kaidan City. I recall always wanting to make city night lights like this in Poser Pro 2012, but poser was so terrible it was difficult getting buildings to light up a scene like this. You had to do a lot of nonsense in the material room messing around with nodes and everything.

The whole reason why there are pre-set scenes is so that people who don't feel like scene building from the ground up by placing props in certain locations and so forth can just open the scene, place the character there, set up their lights if they don't want to use the lights that came with the environment and then hit render and they can bypass all the time consumption of having to manually create an environment. Some environments are a lot easier to just use without doing anything at all to them, for instance if you have a bathroom environment depending on what type of bathroom scene you want. 

If you're aiming for a clean bathroom then you wouldn't add graffiti on the walls, or put trash everywhere. I've been known to modify just about every type of environment there is that I can freely modify. Unlike indoor environments, trying to make outdoor environments is the hardest. I remember spending hours trying to make a farm similar to the ones I seen on the web and I couldn't for the life of me create anything to reflect how cool some of those wallpapers looked.

 Not a lot of people would have the level of patience that I have to attempt something like building an entire farm from the ground up. After awhile you get bored and it's like "screw it." Another thing is the resources as well, I realized that sometimes I will try to create a full blown scene with buildings and everything that's not always visible to the camera so I end up using a lot of space on my GPU when the goal should be to use very few objects as possible so the GPU has enough to render with. 

If I really just want to make a huge scene that  can render from various angles later, then I have to resort to using the CPU, but often than not Environments normally will render regardless of how big it is except for in some cases where a building may contain far too many damn texture maps and bump maps. I've had this issue many times with specific building props being an absolute pain in the goddamn ass to render with a full scene, thus I was forced to cut the scene down. Below I listed both the pros and cons of scenery in art.

 

First The Pros

1. Scenery tells a greater story than an empty scene with only a character present. 
2. Scenery helps people to easily identify what the theme is.
3. It adds more color and flavor to the outlook of the character (s) present.
4. It allows for interaction with the environment
5. It creates certain elements that would be impossible or harder to achieve in an empty scene like tension for horror and thriller themes.
6. Environment and scenery creates a story of its own, it also allows both the creator and the viewer both to immerse themselves in a world or environment the character (s) are placed into. 

Now The Cons 

1. It's time consuming if you're creating an environment from scratch.
2. Scene development can be boring, unless you are already someone who enjoys it.
3. Bigger scenes require too much work and can end up being unnecessary later unless you plan to use the whole scene at some point. 
4. It may cause lag if you are doing a 3D environment and the scene is either too large, or have too many polygons or your machine is just too slow. Some programs will cause this anyway even on a high end machine.
   

I've always wanted an environment like this for my Shadow Hill series, it reflects the Witches Of Kabal's town and punishment so well. It will take me some time but I'm going to build something like this. 😈