Reply To: [Finished] Epic Pumpkin Contest – The Sorcerer’s Revenge

[Aaron Rudderham]

@cgcookiedough Cheers for informing me @silentheart00, and thanks for the recommendation too! Right, now lets get down to business.

Now I find there are two ways you can go about starting a story based render. Either A) You have a story in mind before you begin and start blocking out your scene or B) You have a focal object/character in mind which you then proceed to model, and then build the scene around them (that was the process I went through for the renders Silent mentioned).

It’s safe to say you fall in category B,  because I’m assuming you’re going to want this possessed pumpkin head to be the focus of the render. This means that naturally you’re going to want to focus on it using DoF, making sure that *that* is what draws peoples’ eyes the most. 

Seeing as you’re struggling to think of a story, my biggest advice to you is simple: be bored. I find my creativity spurs the most when I’m either bored out of mind or otherwise in some kind of autopilot mode where I extensively daydream. Showers are the most common place where this takes place, there’s a reason there’s a subreddit based around it haha. Whenever I’m occupied playing games or whatever I just think about what’s in front of me as opposed to what I can be doing. Also music. I spend a lot of my time listening to music and just letting my mind drift away.

But lets assume you use the premise you’ve been thinking of – some kind of blood sacrifice causes demonic entities to bow to your every whim until the next full moon – you’ve then got to think exactly what you’re going to portray in your render. It’s a balancing act between appeal and realism, and I don’t mean realism as in good looking textures and effective lighting, I mean realism as in what you can realistically achieve. There are a lot of projects of mine that were way more ambitious then they came out to be due to lack of skill, time etc, and that can kill both your render and your morale, due to wasted time, energy and a sense of not being good enough. Be smart.

So think of the basic premise of your story and think about what you could make within the confines of the narrative. Maybe a crazed but desperate man slicing his hand open over a pentagram in a desperate attempt to grab a smidgen of power from dark entities so that he may protect his family from some other unsightly horror? Maybe show the demonic beast being summoned but things go awry, which cause the creature to turn on it’s summoner? Or maybe do a “lost footage” esque narrative, with the Blender camera set up to look like a real camcorder, in which an unwitting, imminent victim stumbles across the foul monster in an abandoned building? There are many possibilities, it’s all down to what you want to do.

There are also other things, such as lighting, in which you can use to help tell your story, mainly by using them to focus on something important. Conversely darkness can be just as efficient at storytelling, masking unseen horrors and only giving a hint as to what may be lurking within its shadows. Be sure to use them effectively!

I hope this gives you an inkling as to where you should go next, but if you have any other questions feel free to ask!