So, here’s the plan. Start simple, just a block-in, and then develop. Not sure at this stage where I’m headed, but I’ll work that out as we go. General idea is some kind of hero object set in an interior, much like my ‘Rooster in a Tudor Room’.

I’ve created a simple room in Blender. About 6m x 4m with a door and window. I’ve gone for fairly thick walls just because it looks more interesting. Next import into Vue, add some wood material to the floor and roof, add a cube (representing a chest) for good measure, and render out an hdr panorama. This is quite an interesting point because the placement of the camera is fixed when using that hdr, only the scene can be rotated around that point. I could render out several panos from different points I guess, but it is a limitation of the technique.

Finally use that pano in Marmoset and import the ‘subject’ of the image. In this case I’ve used my owl but will probably replace with something appropriate to whatever image develops from this starting point. I’ve got something Tibetan in mind. I watched part of the Uncharted 2 ‘movie’ yesterday. Amazing environments in that game. There’s a workshop coming up by a guy who works for Naughty Dog on environments. Very tempted.