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Making a Sci-Fi-ish Lighthouse (Patreon)

Published:
2021-07-24 10:55:18
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Covering some ground in this one! Mostly trying to go fast, so it's very much an exercise in "block it in and refine it".  I'm happy with the final result though!! It's not exactly what I was picturing, but I think it has that "whimsical base design covered in industrial greebles" I was hoping for.

Files

Making a Sci-Fi-ish Lighthouse

Covering some ground in this one! Mostly trying to go fast, so it's very much an exercise in "block it in and refine it". I'm happy with the final result though!! It's not exactly what I was picturing, but I think it has that "whimsical base design covered in industrial greebles" I was hoping for.

Comments

VoiD010AUT

Actually the last year i developed the habbit for buildings and environments that i think about what could the persons living there could have made themself to make theyr life less miserable. (Working on a dystopian short) Gives more life, extra detail and helped me speeding up my workflow

Roy

You have made my week again, I commented last time about how you uploaded twice very close periods and you've done it again!

Leondotblend

one hour of raw cg goodness :O these tuts are the best :D!

Howie Day

Love it! I feel that "Now it's 2am" segue *hard*. I know it'd tank the render times but having at least a still-frame with some sort of cool compound-focused light beam coming out of the top might be dope? Especially in the foggier HDR renders. :D

IanHubert

OOOOOoooo- you're totally right, especially since I brought volumetrics into it for those final renders! It'd be totally worth it for a still!

Rodeo's 3D Emporium

Honestly your frustration with showing clients unfinished shots and having them focus on something irrelevant is waaaaayyy to reletable.. Hilarious

Jonas Littke

The rage about clients not understanding WIP work is very relatable. I recently put a placeholder car into the work in progress styleframe for a car commercial and the dude goes "I guess it looks fine, but it's the wrong car, we're not advertising a rally car from the late 80s, why is it the wrong car, this won't work." Buddy, it's because you didn't sent me the car I have been asking you to send me for almost a week, and this Lancia Delta S4 is the sickest car of all time, so that's why we're making a commercial for that now instead.

Richard Cave

love the et bmx bike opening, love the shot

aptass

A lighthouse to brighten my day

David Benzal

It's really amazing! you always make it look easy to do, It would be great, to see your rendering process for the final images, Greetings and congratulations on your work !!

DCUBE

Will you make a lens flare tutorial or asset sometime? That would be really cool, and helpful

Volen CK

So awesome to get a notification for a new vid from you. Thanks for sharing! :)

Luka Hrgovic

Enjoyed this one so much. And the client rant was especially funny... Seems the clients are the same in every part of the world. 😂

Osea Costantini

So awesome! can you make some tutorial about final render and composition?

Falk David

Hey Ian :) I wanted to ask if you played with the asset manager a bit. Did you try it out? I could imagine that I would be really nice for your workflow!

Dawson Henderson

Watching you model and go through your process is the best way I have ever been able to learn while doing Blender. These types of videos are my absolute favorite. Great work on that lighthouse too by the way! It looks absolutely incredible!

Phil South

Wonderful! I've always loved your use of fog, and this is the fog loviest. :D

Phil South

oh and LOL, client work. DGMS. I feel your pain brother.

Jan van den Hemel (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 Haha, I know what you mean about the clients not getting work in progress. One time I went to a meeting with a client and we played a video bit by bit, and at one point one lady paused it and said something about a part she would like to see changed in a specific way (this was 2D animation), then stared at the screen for like 10 seconds. After which she turned to me and said, “oh, I thought you would change it”. She literally thought that by telling me what she wanted to change in hand-made 2D animation, it would magically be changed in the video file I was playing. And another time, a project was cancelled because I was presenting a black and white animatic, and they were furiuous that the animation was not in colour. And I was like, “yes it will be in color, but this is just like an animated storyboard to give an idea of the timing” and they were like nope, cancelled. We ordered colour animation, dammit! Good times, glad I don’t do client stuff anymore! Lots of stories like that…
2021-07-24 14:17

Phil South

You should do something about fog/haze/mist/atmosphere at some point. Unless of course you have already and I missed it. Sorry if this is a FAQ, I'm watching back all these videos I missed as fast as I can. :D

Phil South

oh god it hurts, pls make it stop :) this is why I am working towards doing my own stuff and not doing client work anymore. It just hurts.

Caleb G

ian you should start a minecraft letsplay

zephirus

Agree. The modeling is great but the final touches make the difference. Maybe you can make a video about it @Ian?

MultidimensionalMustard

ayy, neat man u pumpin these out in no time :D always realy excited to find new videos here! keep up the awesome personality man :)

John Dyer

This was really cool! Could you do a lil tut on making those texture maps? I think that'd be super useful!

George Moise

dude, this was so satisfying to watch. One note, please show the entire texturing process. I know you've done it a million times, but I love seeing it!

Paul Richmond

This video was right up my street. I was interested in how you start blocking out large shots like this that don't start with video footage. Really useful to see it in the early stages. Plus I was hoping you'd do another more in-depth look at making buildings. Thanks, Ian.

The Cat Mob

This was so useful in part just to watch your workflow (I love the organic chaos you create) and I’m also glad to hear other people get very confused on how annotations work, it took me a while to figure out how to layer them! ^^’

Bernhard VonZastrow

Omg. I’m only a few minutes into the video and I can’t stop laughing and crying about the client commentary. At my last job we had a client like that. We would show them camera blocking and they kept rejecting it because of gray shaders and non final lighting. They simply refused to even consider any takes if even a single asset didn’t have “correct" shading on it. It was insane. This is for camera blocking! And because they had the money - and we needed it - we had to comply. Needless to say, having to texture (and light) complete scenes that they would then say “actually, no. Let’s do something else.” was incredibly expensive. Sigh. Nice to know we weren’t alone in that hair ripping out situation. 😊

cdilla

Just awesome to see you at work. A real inspiration.

Vaik Nay

Awesome Video Ian! Quick question: What resolution do you usually go with for those big photo texture images you bash together?

Alex White

It's not really difficult to do! Go into photoshop (or if you don't have it, I think Photopea can do the same stuff!) and just throw in all the textures that you think you'll use

Tamar

Great tutorial! I have a question - have you ever considered using more pre-made (I.e. bought from sites like Quixel and Turbosquid) assets to speed up your workflow? Obviously something like this lighthouse doesn’t lend itself too well to that kind of process since all the parts need to fit together, but for little scene fillers like rocks and plants and bins and boxes? I also don’t see you using a lot of PBR textures, even though they’re widely available now… sometimes it seems like you’re having to compensate for the low-fi nature of your texturing by having everything be far away and dense with detail… which sometimes is a lot more work than just using high-quality shaders in the first place, and letting that carry a little more of the weight. This isn’t a criticism though !

IanHubert

Ah will do! I think on this one I literally just plugged the image texture through a bump map-more basic than usual :D

IanHubert

Usually between 2 and 4k. I probably could (and should) go significantly higher res, especially since that one texture is carrying so much of the weight and used multiple times, I just always err on the side of keeping things small, when I can.

IanHubert

I probably don't use as many pre-made assets as I should! One of the reasons is the patreon, though; if I hand-model everything in a scene, it's a lot easier to share it with you guys (even if it's technically permissible under the license, I feel weird distributing anything made by someone else). Also yeah I should DEFINITELY use more PBR textures. I tend to lean really heavily on trying to find the "right" image texture to use as a base for the model, and those are never going to be PBR. That said, there are certain things (large rocks and brick walls and such) where I'll always prefer using a proper purchased or downloaded asset. There's another factor, too, which is that half the time I get an asset or a texture and it's just HUGE, and suddenly my render times go nuts, or my framerate is slashed, and I like having a sense of how big an asset is when I load it into the scene. Mostly though it's just that I have a bunch of habits, and I probably haven't updated them in a while to modern workflows :P

judelightning

are we gonna have a video for every house

IanHubert

Ahahaha at least for one of em!

IanHubert

Ohohoho that's annoying!!! I worked for a director who was convinced the "correct" way for me to do VFX was to complete the VFX for *every single take*, *start to finish*, because otherwise how could he edit it? There are a lot of factors I value in clients now, and a solid visual imagination is one of the biggest (they also tend to be great at describing what they want) :D.

Found And Explained

Excellent video as always. I'll be interested to see how you breakdown this scene/improve the road and animation down the line. Could I perhaps put into your mind a CGI breakdown video when this scene is complete? :)

Blender Bender

Did you know grey humans actually add realism? It's actually for realism. (You should say that to a client one time)

Chipp Walters

FYI, the gray box doesn't work with the cyclists. I'm available to help art direct.

IanHubert

I dunno what to tell ya; test audiences *loved* Boxy the Plucky Comic Relief Cube.

IanHubert

"See it'll make the other humans seem even MORE realistic!"

Wolfers

Dam i love you Ian Hubert.

Lewis Turner

These are my favourite types of your videos, just a proper sit-down shadow session with your thought process. Love it!

Brett Williams

Hey Ian, where did you get your reference human model? Trying to find one has actually been more difficult than I thought.

GI Jungles

The best part of the video starts after..."I'm tired and babbling." Then it's just free flow fun

Matt Castley (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-20 10:00 That shadow ray trick for glass is such a gamechanger, thanks for sharing! Where did you find out about it??
2021-07-26 09:15

Diego Nossa

Yeah very useful! I struggled with this issue before

Mad Crow

Oh man! this is insane! i love it!!

I Like it Hardcore Tv

Lol, i thought it was just me who felt that way, i dont like showing people my work early specifically for that reason... but I always enjoy these type of videos, never think its babbling a lot of good info makes the videos more entertaining also...and of course we would like the asset :😁

Woodley Nye

Hey Ian, love this! At around 24:20 you exclaim Shift+Q, just wondering what that is hotkeyed to? Looks like it's just setting it to shade smooth?

Blender Bender

thats from his script video, he made a script that shades smooth turns off backface culling and turns on smooth normals. very helpful

Zachary Macintyre

It's mentioned in the manual somewhere in the materials or rendering sections, not sure exactly where. It's just one of those tricks that floats around because it's really handy in certain cases :)

Daan de Bruijn

The shear speed of Ian's modelling in a semi-brain-dead-midnight state is mind boggling.. Not sure how he constrains to a certain axis though, even tried playback speed of 0.25. That's an awesome experience by the way.. Maybe he does click and drag real fast? Thanks for a great video. P.S. Is anyone else wondering if the 'dark video' from the Patrons idea will one day become a thing? If not, no worries Ian! You put out such an insane amount of great content I feel bad not being able to chuck more money at you..

IanHubert

Yeah! Sorry it's a callback to the previous video. I had a whole bit in there where I was explaining what it did but apparently I edited it out??

Carter Burr-Kirven

I'm not sure which particular operation you're referring to, but Blender lets you lock movement, scale and rotation to certain axes or pairs of axes by hitting the relevant letter after the operation key—hit G, X to move only along the X axis, R, Z to rotate around the Z axis, etc. And if you hit Shift+[axis] it'll exclude that axis, i.e. S, Shift+Y will scale along the X and Z axes, leaving the object's Y scale unchanged, or G, Shift+Z will let you slide an object on the XY plane—I use that one allll the time to reposition objects while keeping them on the ground. (These work in other editors too, like the UV and graph editors, although the double-axis thing isn't really relevant when you're only working with two axes.) Is that what you were looking for?

IanHubert

Oh! Can you post the time when I was constraining to an axis? A lot of times you can constrain to an axis just by hitting "X, Y, or Z", but that's straightforward enough that I suspect it's not what you're talking about. There's also a bit where I'm toggling between the Global coordinate space and Local/Normal coordinate space (when I'm making the windmill)- which is very much inspired by the tip in Jan's video here: https://youtu.be/8rOGmM3PnnE Let me know if that doesn't cover it! ALSO YES! I was thinking about that video yesterday! I really do need to finish it! [edit- I saw Carter's reply (thank you so much for that, Carter!) and realized I never posted this one?? I have so many tabs full of effectively finished responses that I just need to start friggin' hitting "POST" on.]

Woodley Nye

Thanks so much, you rule Ian!

Dan

Are you going to upload this?

Max Cahill

Laughing my butt off at the client work grey human placeholder comment - spot on 🙃

Justin

thanks for sharing Ian!

Mornarion

This is so nuts, thanks as always. You made my day, and it was a really nasty one, I needed something cool to brighten it ;)

patrick small

great work i aspire to be as good as you one day also how did you stitch that image texture together

khang

how can I download this texture? thanks

HanMe

tight

Connor McGuire

your grey human story had me cry laughing - too real. i'm a new patron. just wanted to say you're a huge inspiration. thanks for everything. most importantly the grey human story.

Victorjoue

Great video as always, I was wondering, is there a place where you shared the pre-made sampler of texture you use at 16 min in the video ? I know you did share something similar for the trafic light video but it was more a littles pieces of metal sampler texture back then

VoiD010AUT

It's always blowing my mind how fast you solve designe problems and add new stuff to it. Sometimes I'm sitting an hour just rotating around my object and have no idea whats missing.

Collin Cameron

Here's a fun fact for you. Lighthouses are actually powered by a single, ordinary light bulb, just amplified and manipulated by mirrors and lenses and such.