We've seen some impressive Blender projects in recent years. From an animation that breaks the fourth wall to the Oscar-nominated animation Flow, the free, open-source software is used for everything from 3D modelling to feature-length 2D animation.
But this scene got our attention for a different reason: it looks so real. With a fish-eye lens effect the image looks like a could easily be a photo from a retro indie album cover, but the majority of the image is a 3D render created in Blender.
Fun project I did with my girlfriend from r/blender
The digital artist Daniel Skomorovsky first created the environment using cassette meshes. He says he had a base cassette model and then compiled a range of uniform-size textures into a perfect grid as a form of sprite-sheet. Since the textures were evenly spaced, he could shift the projection in the UV editor by a certain amount each time to get a new texture.
"Do this enough times + random offsets and you get enough variation to where you cant tell they repeat," he writes on Reddit. As for the textures, he says he drew them and then edited them in Photoshop.
Then came the addition of the model – Daniel's girlfriend. He had her pose and then used a greenscreen key in the video editing software Davinci Resolve to add the image plane into the scene. He said he took the greenscreen photos after doing the initial 3D work so he could match the pose and lighting to the way he wanted my scene to look.
Combined they look so impressive that you have to zoom in very close to tell that the image is a composite of two scenes. It has a real sense of place to it too. "I can smell the record store dank, and I like it," one person commented on Reddit, and I totally agree.
Check out Daniel's account on ArtStation to see more of his work. If you're getting started in the free software. See our roundup of Blender tutorials. We also have a guide to the best animation software in general.
