The focus of our first lesson is on planning and pre-production. You will engage in brainstorming ideas and crafting storylines for your projects. Sonja will cover techniques for gathering references, organizing them, and transforming them into a comprehensive to-do list.

In this week’s lesson, you will learn tools and techniques for crafting landscapes and rocks using Blender and Gaea. You will explore online resources for textures and learn how to create your own using Materialize and Adobe Substance’s 3D Sampler. Sonja will demonstrate setting up advanced materials in Blender, utilizing height and vertex painting for seamless blending.

This lesson focuses on creating an architectural kitbash kit, a method widely used in game design for its efficiency in creating varied buildings from reusable assets. You will begin by exploring metrics and scale considerations. Then, you will delve into a range of modifiers, addons, and tools inside Blender to create basic building blocks. Following this, you will explore different techniques for adding intricate details. The next step involves creating variations from building blocks and assembling them into different structures. Finally, Sonja will touch upon optimization strategies to ensure good performance.

In this lesson, you will learn all about vegetation creation. You will start by mastering manual tree creation with the skin modifier and geometry nodes, and then you will investigate both free and paid vegetation creation addons for Blender. Following that, Sonja will demonstrate different techniques using modifiers to create flowers and plants in general. Finally, you will delve into scattering objects using particles, geometry nodes, and various addons, both free and paid.

In Lesson 5, you will wrap up your exploration of asset creation. Sonja will demonstrate simple methods for crafting cables, ropes, and knots. Additionally, she will guide you through utilizing Blender's cloth system for creating dynamic elements such as curtains, flags, and awnings. You will also learn how to add destruction to your models using cell fracture and rigid body simulations. Sonja will demonstrate to you some efficient techniques for integrating bodies of water into your scenes. Finally, various resources available for adding people to 3D scenes will be discussed.

The focus in this lesson will be on organizing and integrating all previously created assets into a library and assembling the scene. You will explore topics such as aspect ratios, camera angles, lens selection, and depth of field as you learn to set up your shots. Furthermore, you will delve into guiding the viewer's eye through your images by manipulating contrast and learn how to balance compositions to create visually pleasing images.

Lighting holds immense importance, shaping the mood, reflecting emotions, and directing attention, so this week is all about exploring lighting and color. You will begin with an artistic exploration of lighting, breaking it down into key aspects such as quality, function and direction, and ratio. Then, you will dive into practical lighting setups within Blender, discussing how you can art direct your shadows, add volumetric effects, set up light and shadow linking as well as world lighting techniques. Next, you will delve into color, examining its associative power and, lastly, Sonja will guide you through her personal lighting process, offering valuable tips and considerations to simplify the process.

Lesson 8 marks the final Blender session, providing an opportunity to finalize your scene with any remaining details. During this lesson, you will discuss the decision-making process between 3D and 2D workflows. Sonja will share techniques for optimizing files, setting up render passes, and adjusting settings to decrease render times. Additionally, you will learn about different render manager add-ons suited for managing more complex scenes.

The class concludes with a focus on Photoshop. Throughout the lesson, Sonja will demonstrate her preferred post-processing techniques and effects to refine and perfect an image. She will show you how you can use render passes to adjust certain aspects of your images and how you can incorporate photos to elevate the quality of your renders.