One of the most fun things about the Blender Market is its variety of assets. I try to use that to my advantage when creating the sale graphics by just having fun bashing together otherwise unrelated objects to make a scene. The summer 2022 sale graphic features a couple pups enjoying a hot pool day, and it was inspired by my love of, well, cute animals and hot pool days! I also just wanted any excuse to use the Inflatable Unicorn model by quantum.

I started out with the Modern Villa model by SHcreations as the background and didn’t have to do much editing other than adding a few palm trees by Moonik Office and a realistic sand scan by Lis-220 to replace the flat grass texture.

Black Dachshund by 3D Shaker became the main character because I was looking for a smaller dog to take the helm and it had a solid enough base texture. It’s really a model that’s meant to be viewed from farther away though, so I had to add some fur. Blender’s new experimental hair curves features proved to be up to the task, though I really wish there was some sort of collision detection or a way to keep the fur above the surface of the mesh while grooming. I didn’t have time to make it perfect, so I only added fur to the parts that the camera could see and even cheated by smoothing over some artifacts using Photoshop’s healing brush.

Of course, he needed some style (and I didn’t want to spend time on making eyes less uncanny), so I gave him some sunnies by razsoft, an over the top gold cuban chain by INVSBL, a dog tag by Francesco Milanese which I added a custom inscription to with a bump map, as well as some flippers by Fancesco as well. It’s a hot look!

Surrounding him, as further proof of his membership in the leisure class, are grapes, bananas, and a pineapple by pixelpoems, an ice cream shake by FrazerC, and a vividly red retro radio by Oleg. What’s he listening to? Pup-punk, obviously.

The second doggo, Pepper the German Shepherd by 3D People (proof dogs are people too), came in as a fairly high res scan, but not quite detailed enough to have up close without the same fur treatment. To save myself from having to create a second hair system, I just placed him a bit in the background and added some depth of field. He got an inflatable flamingo to match the dachshund’s unicorn.

The Blender Market banner hanging in the background was just created by pinning a subdivided plane by the corners and running a cloth sim.

The relaxed folks in the background were extremely easy to add thanks to the many beach themed character scans by 3D People. The ones used here are Andy, Svenja, Dan, and Elena.

Lastly, I replaced the water in the villa scene with an animated water caustics shader by Bas Architects. It worked great and I think it made for a nice touch. I added some underwater lights to cast the caustics up and onto the floaties a bit, but the impact was pretty small on an already brightly lit scene so it’s not really noticeable in the final render.

After some light color correction in Photoshop’s Camera Raw filter, I called it complete. All in all, the project only took about two full days of work thanks to having the assets right there. The majority of the time was spent tweaking the composition, lighting, and adding custom touches here and there to make them all work together as a whole.

I hope you enjoy the render, found some useful new products, and have had a wonderful summer so far! 💙