Starting with the shed (which is going to be the garden equivalent of CTU from 24), I decided to complete the rest of the environment ready to animate in. Using the shed in my own garden as a guideline, I built the 3D shed similar to how it would be built in real life; the seperate side panels, roof then extra features such as the doors and windows.
Next, I added two strips of soil down the sides of the garden, ready to put flowerbeds in. I cut out a square in a corner of the lawn and added a patio texture onto a box that I put into the space. I then modelled two benches with box modelling and extrusion and put them on the newly created patio.
Again using my own garden as a reference point, I created two differing fence panels and duplicated them around three of the garden edges between fence posts.
I had to create a house front for the edge left over, so I created a box and extruded out holes for the windows and patio doors. I then created the window and door frames separately and slot them in the gaps. I then textured the walls with a brick texture and created tiles for the roof. Unfortunately, I had to create a false reflection in the windows of the garden, as adding a reflection map made the render times per frame ridiculous. I did this by creating a snapshot of the garden from the point of view from the windows. I then took this into photoshop, added a sky background and a gaussian blur. I turned up the brightness slightly then added the finished texture onto the windows with some specular and gloss added. Wa la, a garden window reflection.
All that was missing from the garden now was plants, bushes and trees. I attempted create some flowers for the flowerbeds, but they looked too stiff and lego-like and were obviously duplicated. I know that in industry, trees and plants would usually be generated with a plugin.
One example of this is the scene in The Incredibles (on the making of it) where Mr Increbible tries to get a cat out of a tree. For that scene all the trees in the background were generated to save time.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the facilities to do this, so I thought it was justifiable to download freely available plants from
http://www.turbosquid.com to fill out the rest of garden.