
I’ve mainly stuck to still-life hard surface modeling in my time with Blender, but after trying my hand at terrain modeling with World Creator I got the itch to work on a “scene”. My first attempt didn’t pan out as well as I’d hoped, in part because of the overlarge scale I had chosen, so I thought that maybe if I pared down the focus I might be more successful. I’ll leave that decision to you, dear reader.
If you are of a particular persuasion, then you might recognize the setting from some of the details; for everyone else, I ended up with a scene taking place in the setting of The Secret World. Here we see an emergence of the Filth, the by-product of the impending failure of the Gaia Engines that contain the cosmic horrors known as the Sleepers. Who knows what’s going on inside that building? Whatever it is, it’s not good.
The Scene

I am sure that my layout isn’t the best use of resources, and that my approach isn’t completely naive (Surprise! It totally is!). This is one part “I have an idea!” and one part “throw whatever in there that works and fry the video card!” After I wrote this draft I found some videos on using the Composition editor in Blender and boy howdy! That would have saved me a whole lot of headache had I know more about it at the time.
I started the project thinking that the scene would be head-on, looking into the doorway. Originally there weren’t any tentacles involved; it wasn’t even a Secret World joint. I wanted to make it kind of urban fantasy, so I was thinking of a portal of some sort at the far end of a hallway, visible through the open door. Then, for some reason, I thought “what if that was a portal to Agartha?”, the central hub within TSW. I had some issues modeling the transition between a hallway and a gateway to a more expansive area, so rather than send the viewer in to the doorway, I opted to send something else out through the doorway.
Bits – Posters

You can’t have an alleyway without some trash, so I pulled down some assets from BlenderKit and Poly Haven for things like the AC units, the fire escape, trash and trash bins. But I wanted more than just something to stand up against the wall so I found some info on how to make “worn posters”. Shady alleyways seem like the natural place for some guerilla marketing so I whipped up a fake band advertisement on a site called PosterMyWall.com and ran it through some paper-destroying nodes. I also downloaded a poster for the Morninglight and gave it the same treatment because where there’s one poster, there’s multiple posters.
Bits – Graffiti

Since it was such a massive expanse of wall, I felt the fire escape region needed something of it’s own. I could imagine some nihilist using the fire escape to reach a higher-up area for their art, so I created a quick graffiti image in Affinity Photo and slapped it onto the wall. In the render, the text is skewed, but when the house lights were on I realized this misaligned the brick textures so I un-rotated it for this screenshot so it didn’t look like garbage. In the render it’s too dark to tell otherwise. Shhhhhhh…
Bits – Procedural Alley

After deciding to switch the render perspective from head-on to a wider shot I needed something to cap the back alley. Sometime last year I bought a Humble Bundle full of Blender add-ons, most of which I have yet to look at but some seemed really cool, like Procedural Alleys. It allows me to pick a form-factor and generate a mesh, and then mix-and-match the visuals using the extension’s menu. Manually creating another building across the street would have taken me a lot longer to set up, so thankfully I had this extension at my disposal.
Bits – Tentacles

Way back when I learned how to create cables in a manual way using curves, thickness, and convert-to-mesh. The large tentacles are just these curves, along with a Simple Deform modifier “Taper” setting applied. The smaller tentacles were made with the Cablerator add-on which automates some of the same manual steps. These assets were created in another file (for reusability) and were linked into the main composition and arranged to fit inside the doorway. I realize that these aren’t the most organic of tentacles, but I’ve seen some of the representations of the Filth in various TSW media, and I don’t think my versions are too far off from what folks might be used to seeing, so I’m OK with them. Could they be dripping? Yes. Could they be pooling? Absolutely. Did I want to spend the time nit-picking on this when I had a lot more comp work to do? No.

Since the Filth is always described as “black and oily”, I found this cool and disgusting texture on BlenderKit. It was a bit too petroleum-like so I toned down some of the values and removed the HSV node from the flow; the result is still nasty, but with fewer of those pretty rainbows we tend to see when light hits an oil slick.
What Works
When my eye slides down the alley to the building across the street, I feel that the lighting, the slight DOF, and the volumetric fog hit their stride right around there. I even like the graffiti and the fire escape; I think this area of the render works for me. I don’t really know where the blue light is coming from — I’m assuming there’s a neon sign somewhere in the nearby street, stage right — but when we’re focused on oily tentacles emerging from an alleyway door, “where’s the lighting coming from” is really the least of my personal concerns.
I also like the ground fog. I had originally tried working with Blender’s mist and z-depth systems, but those resulted in visuals that didn’t play well with the near-field effects I wanted. I switched over to a volumetric shader with some noise-controlled alpha to get the creepy striations that work well for me.
What Might Not
While I like the models of the AC units on the wall close to the camera, I’m not sure about the near-field experience otherwise. I think the posters could use some darkening or messing-up, which might be solved by dimming the other off-camera light added to provide illumination to the near-field elements. The bricks on this side of the door are also giving me headaches, in part because I didn’t get a displacement working for the wall so the line of the door frame is too smooth when it should be more jagged.
The hallway, the hallway lighting, and the tentacles were An Experience. I vacillated between rigging up some additional volumetric fog to carry the swamp-light out of the hallway with creepy god-rays, but the scene was already heating up my PC and I didn’t want to push my luck…or overdo the gimmicks in the scene. The oily texture on the tentacles reflects the green light behind it as well as some of the lighting from the back-door lamp above it, and might be just enough to show the viewer what horrors are emerging, but not so much so that the viewer can completely comprehend what they are seeing. However, the more I look at the green light and its effects, the more I’m reminded of early 2000’s 3D programs that valued ease of use over power, and I think it might make the comp look too amateurish…which it is, but it’s not like I want to advertise it if I can get away with not advertising it.
Lessons Learned

Even a simple scene such as this one is pretty damn complicated. The wall is just a plane with no depth except for the extruded hallway, and even that is just a tube with a low-roughness texture used to reflect the green light inside. I pulled a lot of assets from Poly Haven and BlenderKit because I have plugins that let me browse and download directly within Blender, and that alone saved me a whole lot of grief. Had I decided to model other stuff for the scene, they wouldn’t be anywhere near the quality of the items I was able to download, and I’d probably get frustrated and quit the project before it was complete. Yay for convenience! But then again, boo for doing the quote easy work unquote and leaving the scene’s flavor to other people. I designed the scene, sure, but at least 50% of the work is not mine.
What I learned this morning after watching a few videos is how to use different scenes, and then to bring renders together in the compositor tab. In this scenario I’d render the wall, door, and tentacles as one scene, the props as another, and the procedural alleyway as a third. Maybe I’d throw in the fog as a fourth. The lights would need to be present in all scenes, though, to ensure all scenes had the same lighting. Then, each render would be part of an image. Using the compositor tab, I could layer the images on top of one another to create the same scene. The benefit, apparently, is that Blender could be more performant when doing the work, and every aspect of the scene didn’t need to be “always on” after I had deemed it ready for prime-time.
Another option would be to create a new comp, run the Procedural Alley, render it face-on, and use the image on a plane rather than instantiate a whole new mesh and all of the accompanying mini-mesh objects that make up the back-part of the render. I feel that having all that geo for a sliver of visibility makes the comp very heavy. I’ve seen a lot of videos where artists are using billboard images of things like trees, grass, and shrubs in order to populate a scene with thousands of instances; that would be impossible to do with a full mesh tree and while one building wouldn’t break the bank, turning it into a billboard might save me some grief in the future.
Now that the render is “done”, I might go back and see if I can tweak a few things. Someone on-the-line suggested breaking up the parking lot with, say, a pothole or something. I had been looking for small piles of trash — wrappers, paper cups, tin cans, newspapers, etc. — but didn’t find anything pre-made that I liked and didn’t want to spend the time creating something myself, but I might put more effort into that now. I want to see about splitting things into scenes and merging them back in via the composition tab, so I’ll probably try that as well. But overall I don’t think there will be any major changes to the original scene, so it’s time to move on to something else.