Original subtitles

Hey everyone and welcome to the reference gathering stage.

Finding references is one of the most important things to do when starting a project.

It's easy to think that you can contain all of the information about an

environment in your head, but the truth is you need a giant library of images to

refer to when creating everything.

It's really important to know the way the

world behaves and there are micro details that only a picture can hold.

You should have references that inspire the general look and feel of your

environment as a whole, but it's also important to have detailed references

that we can refer to on a technical exact level.

I like to gather references both from the

real world and 3D renders.

This gives me a good idea of what things

look like stylized and also in pure realism.

So let's go ahead and start exploring the

first database I use for reference hunting and that is ArtStation.

ArtStation is my primary platform for consuming 2D and 3D art and it's also a

place I often go to find inspiration and save images out that I think could inform

my projects.

For example, here is some really cool

Halo Infinite concept art made by the talented artist Sergei Snigarev and it

gave me some really cool ideas for potential buildings in my scene.

Now especially when gathering references from 3D art, it's really important to not

recreate what you find.

These are people's worlds and personal

artwork and it would entirely defeat the purpose to just take what they created.

Instead, you should pick out small pieces that inspire you from a large variety of

work to help develop your own unique idea.

Pinterest is also a massively helpful

platform for finding references and inspiration.

I'll scroll through pages and pages of

images similar to my desired environment and grab tons of useful pictures.

For example, here I went down a rabbit hole of grungy cyberpunk type

environments and ended up scoring 15 to 20 really solid references that will

inform my scene a whole lot.

We're making an urban environment, right?

So start by searching industrial alleyway or dense city street or cyberpunk

building and then under each image that interests you is a whole bunch of more

images that fit the same vibe.

Crazy powerful for reference gathering.

Finally, I love using Google Earth.

It's really effective to just jump

straight into environments and take your own screenshots to use as references.

For example, for this project, I would explore around a lot of Middle Eastern

cities and also cities in India like New Delhi or Mumbai, Mombasa in Africa,

Lahore in Pakistan and other places to find objects and buildings that inspired me.

So let's say I want to create a city street in New York City.

I can totally just drop my street view guide down and explore for hours taking

screenshots of scenes that inspire me as a whole or even zoom into individual

objects in the world like telephone poles or specific buildings.

Super useful.

Like I said before, gathering references

is an integral part of any 3D project.

So I encourage you to take the time to

find a large variety of images that inspire you and that will support your

execution on the technical side of 3D but also help you imagine the story behind

your scene.

Good hunting and I will see you in the

next episode.