Shoeburyness beach

This is the photo that inspired me to model this scene, I really loved its relaxing appeal and creation of open spaces that may no be so well know in Essex. My aim was to almost replicate this exact photo but in 3d, I am aiming for a high level of render quality and realism.

I started by modeling the walkway and wave breaker from cubes materialised with a good wood grain effect with the bitmap bump over the top. I made the cubes editable, and used the soft selection to make them look different to one another, organic also and worn. I made the metal part of the breaker in the same way and used a rust bitmap with a cellular bump on it.



I wanted to create a realised foreground and sand, as often just bitmap images look quite poor and lifeless. So I decided to model pebbles and stones from cylinders, changing their shape and making them flatter, rounder etc. I was unsure of how to materialise these, as just a gradient may not work so well, I found an image of a sunset which mainly consisted of browns and oranges with small highlights in areas, I tried it on the pebbles and it work perfectly.



Here shows the organic shaped wooden legs of the breaker, and the metal bars that I modeled all from eye from the above photo of Shoeburyness Beach.

The bitmap gives good colour variance when wrapped around the sphere.





I started to copy and past all of the wooden legs and also rotated them and spun them around, upside down etc to get even more varience to the scene. I also made a sandy beach under the pebbels, which has a bump map over it aswell. You can see that I made the plan an editable poly, so I could make the sand look like it has built up in ares of the environment.


I burried part of the walkway into the sand like is shown in the photo at the start of this post.


Positioning the pebbels was very time consuming, as I made the sand very organic and uneven I had to lower each pebble by hand and eye into the right place sticking out of the sand.


To create more perspective, I made the far away legs alot smaller. I did this so I didnt have to create more to get the depth of feild, if I did that render time would have been dramatical increased.


I also made the legsa and metal work along this direction narrower aswell to create more perspective.


I added two water planes into this scene, one for close in at the shore and the other the the rest of the sea. The reason fo rdoing this is that the water is calmer at the shore, so I wanted to replicate this as I am aiming for this scene to be as accurate as possible. I used a bump on the material of "Noise" I animated this also over 300 frames, chaning the "Phase" up to 3.0.

Again I added the lens effect "Glow" as in the other scenes. This especial works well over water as the water has "Rraytraced" reflections on it. I placed the camera in the similar position to that in the referenc photo.


I used the keyframes to move the camrea and animate it moving across the scene, whilst the water is rippling also.


Here is what the veiw port shows through the camera, almost complete with foreground lighting finished aswell to bring abit more detail into the woodm stones and sand.


Here is a finished render, you can see here the similarity between the reference image. The still water at the front is visible, and I feel it gives this scene that edge towards a photographic render. I am very pleased with this scene, I did spend a large amount of time on the modeling, and just as long on the lighting.