Continuing on with my “inspired by The Secret World for some reason” series, I had gotten it into my head to create a scene centered on an old New England farm house. My original thought was to have something going on inside the house, maybe bringing back the tentacles of the Filth, or maybe having light bursting through the windows, but I decided to go with something more subtle. The image above wasn’t even the interstitial version; I had also considered something far more subtle and, confidentially, terrifying if I had been able to pull it off, but I opted for the green lights in the forest which reminded me of a mission in Secret World Legends involving wisps on the outskirts of Kingsmouth.

This was a very involved project, and I restarted it maybe twice? It’s got a little bit of everything, so let’s break it down.

Preparation

I had seen a lot of videos recently saying that if you’re going to model something, find references. I had been blowing off this advice because I was concerned that I’d end up copying the reference and not making something truly unique, but in the end I gave it a shot, and…well…I was actually correct.

This is a real house, located at 10 Sophies Way in Cumberland, ME. I had searched for “New England farmhouse” and was kind of let down that most of the results were new construction, and would barely qualify as a “farmhouse” except in the same way that you see crap at Target with a “country” aesthetic. Considering I live in New England, I know what a mid-1800’s regional farmhouse looks like, and when I came across the Sophies Way house, I thought it would cover the bases. It’s got worn wooden siding, rustic wooden windows, that obnoxious slope to the roof, and a front garden filled with riotous wildflowers. There’s actually more to the real house that I didn’t include in the model since the render only mimics the photo above. In all honesty, the angle of the photo was exactly how I had planned on rendering this image, so I felt that the Universe was telling me that this was the right reference to use.

I also picked up a copy of PureRef because I have seen no fewer than five Blender users using it for their reference organization. I don’t know how often I’ll actually use it outside of these projects, but it’s been quite the boon and I can see why it’s popular with the modeling crowd.

The House

I cannot believe that this was as difficult for me as it was. I had modeled it in my first stab at the project, and once I finished stumbling through it I realized that I had taken the long way around; that version of the project was crap, so I used lessons learned to get this version. You wouldn’t think that two cubes would be difficult, but the issue was getting them to line up correctly, and then to get the two-tiered, low-slope roof in place, which is actually one piece on the real house.

What really threw me was the UVs. Before I opted to go with physical siding I tried applying a texture which had displacement, but it didn’t work so well. Part of the issue was that my topology was crap, so I moved around a bunch of verts and edges to get more of a standard layout that didn’t pull textures. In the end, I didn’t end up texturing the base house anyway.

Windows

I don’t know how professional modelers do their windows, but this was quite the learning experience for me.

They’re made out of a single cube and were originally arrayed in place. However, because I needed them on the front of both sections of the house as well as on the sides of the same, that fell apart rather quickly. In the end, there are a few groups of them which made texturing a bit of a chore.

Front Door

The first version I did of this was far better, IMO, and for some reason I forgot how I had done it; this version took me a while to get all of the Colonial flare the way I wanted it to. Looking at it now, I realize that I forgot the door handle, but it doesn’t show in the render so I guess that’s OK. This is actually seven different objects. Most of the single concerns in the overall model are made up of multiple objects which I used to think wasn’t something that “was allowed” in modeling, but have since learned that if my system can handle it, nothing is “not allowed”.

Siding

Siding was fun, and by fun I mean not that fun. After ditching the texture with displacement on account of the fact that it made everything worse, I went with an angled plane, arrayed over the top of itself, duplicated, and cropped where necessary.

Chimney

I don’t know if there’s anything to say about this. It’s probably the easiest thing I made.

Fence

This was the most chill piece. It’s basically two rails with arrayed pickets. The gate was a bit more complex as it needed a diagonal brace since it’s not supported by occasional pillars, and I saved money by not having to model or download hinges or handles for it.

Foliage

And now for the part which had worried me the most when I was mulling over my reference image.

Being a farmhouse, and also “in the woods”, I knew I’d need a lot of ground foliage and some kind of distant treeline. I used a free version of GeoScatter for the yard plants and grass. I cranked the density way down which might not seem true, but this plugin adds several layers of objects to the scene so the result ends up looking really dense. If I ever get around to finalizing this project, I’ll probably have to render out the ground cover somehow so I won’t have to deal with it in the future.

The trees came from a plugin called AlphaTrees Pro which I bought, and I am very glad I did. Rather than use objects like GeoScatter, it uses billboards of trees which takes up far less memory than the lawn does.

Still, I’m glad I bought the 4090 with the 24GB of vRAM, because I needed it when working with the foliage.

Environment

This collection includes everything else about the scene that isn’t the camera.

Skydome

The arcs are actually forming 1/2 of a sphere, and that blemish at the top is a PNG of the Moon applied to a panel (the moon isn’t visible in the render due to lighting concerns). I learned how to make this skydome from Martin Klekner and although you really can’t see much of it in the render, there’s enough of it there to matter.

Volumetric Fog

Back on my bullshit, though, I added a volumetric cube with a height equaling the height of the house, more or less, in order to provide the scene with the kind of fog one might expect from a haunted night-time New England scene. It also helped to diffuse a blue tint throughout.

Lighting

Oh boy. While I had been dreading the foliage, I was really terrified of the lighting. This is one aspect of modeling that I cannot get right. Still, there’s a few lights included in this scene, and I guess they work well enough.

On the left we have “the Moon”. I had to place it high enough to be “at expected Moon angles”, but that ended up casting shadows at a relatively steep angle so I fudged things in the Name of Creativity so I could get my shadows where I wanted them. The cluster of lights on the right are the green “wisps” in the forest. Those lights are placed in and around the tree billboards in a way that allows them to shine, but hopefully not in a way that calls attention to the fact that the trees are just images stuck to planes. Finally, I put some candle-esque light in some of the windows; someone is home, but do they know that they’re being watched by something in the woods?

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how much Moonlight the scene should have as I wanted the lighting to be present enough to cast shadows, but not so much that the lighting in the treeline would get lost. While the render looks pretty dark when the image is small, I am OK with the current overall level of scene lighting as it makes the green lights and the window lights stand out more while allowing them both to be subtle in their own right.

Trees and Shadows

The last aspect is the inclusion of some trees in the front yard. I hadn’t originally planned for this, but I wanted the Moonlight to cast shadows on the house, and as soon as I threw down one tree, I realized that it was also in the camera view, and looked pretty good so I added a few more not only to fill in the gaps, but to cast additional shadows.

However, I couldn’t place a tree in a way that it would cast a shadow on the house extension and not take over the camera view so instead I floated the tree in mid-air, putting it between the Moonlight and the house extension so the extension receives shadows but doesn’t put the tree right in front of the camera.

Texturing

I am proud to say that all of the texturing was done inside Blender. I did not resort to Substance Painter at all in this project. I am sad to say that I didn’t create any of my own textures. I used BlenderKit to find suitable textures, and anything that came in whole (AlphaTrees, GeoScatter) brought it’s own textures along with it. Honestly I am not that sad about this in part because other people have done good work and have offered their materials for others to use, so thank you! But I also opened each texture and examined how it was built and in some cases added some tweaks of my own to mess with brightness and contrast or HSV.

I’m getting a bit confused with the modeling pipeline these days, though. Some objects were not UV unwrapped and the textures look fine while others were Cube Projection unwrapped both with and without seams. I had to instance a few materials so I could change their scale and position, so I have a lot of duplicate sources split off into different versions. I haven’t purged the .blend file yet of unused content so I don’t know what the final tally is.

What Works

Overall, I think the whole thing works. The moonlight looks pretty decent, especially with the fog giving the scene an excuse to have the blue midnight tint to it. Adding the foreground trees, though, was something I’m very pleased with as it gives some “volume” to the scene that would otherwise be missing had the trees not been there. The AlphaTrees and GeoScatter results are good, and I’m especially liking the trees as they look tall and dense and detailed without wearing down the scene’s memory. And the green lights in the forest as well as the lights in the windows look pretty good as well.

What Doesn’t Work

While I am happy with the whole scene, I feel that this looks more like a still from a video game than a real image. Again, not saying that I’m going to burn it all down, but it wasn’t the mark I was trying to hit. I don’t know if what I did anywhere is capable of making this scene look “real”, meaning that my decisions and techniques are lacking in this regard, or if it’s just a matter of figuring out “better lighting”. I did not actually look for references of “woodlands at night” or “houses at night”, and I realize now that I probably should have, as it might have helped answer some of my own questions.