Setting up the scene - Blender Tutorial

Now that we have our objects in place, let's go ahead and start setting up the scene and getting it ready to render. Now I want to render this against a seamless backdrop and this is basically a curved wall so that doesn't have any corners that will give you any weird shadows. And I'm sure you've seen pictures of these if you've ever seen a picture of a photo studio. So we can built one of these out of a simple box. So I'm just going to go ahead and hit create, and I'm going to create a cube, zoom out a little bit and let's go ahead, and scale that up quite a bit. Now this is going to be our background, so we can make this pretty big. Now I want to go into edit mode here, and I'm going to select some of these spaces. So, I'm going to select these spaces here, delete them, select this space and delete it. Now what we've done is basically created a floor and a back wall but we need to make this seamless. So, I'm going to use a bevel to soften this edge. So go into edge mode here, select this edge, go mesh, edges, bevel and then here, I can dial up the amount of bevel, as well as the number of segments. So, typically this will start with one segment and we can dial this up as much as I want. Now I'm going to probably put that right around seven or eight and we'll make the bevel pretty high, just enough to give us a good curve here. Then once I have that, I pretty much have my seamless backdrop, but there's one more thing I need to do, and that's flip the normals. Now, because this was originally a cube, the normals are facing out and down. We need to flip those around, so I'm going to go ahead and select all of these, go in to mesh. Normals, flip normals, and that will give us good normals for this. So now we can go back into object mode, in fact, I'm going to also make sure the shading is smooth for this. And then let's go ahead and move this into place. So I'm going to go ahead and move this up. So that it's exactly at the bottom of the box. You can see it's right about there. And then I can actually make this a little bit wider just to make sure I have enough space for the objects in the camera. And if I want, I can also probably push this back quite a bit. So I want that seamless backdrop to be pretty far behind the box so that way, I get a very smooth shadow. Now, this is probably a little too close here, so I'm going to go back into edit mode and just pull that front edge a little bit forward. So now I've got my backdrop and now all I have to do is arrange my objects. Now I don't have my final camera in place at the moment but let's go ahead and get the objects arranged pretty much the way that we want and then we can position the camera. So I'm going to have my camera something like this here, so I want to go ahead and start off, by rotating this box just a little bit. And then I want a couple of these water packets, maybe about three of these and I'm going to have them kind of laid out in front of the box. So the first thing I want to do is go ahead and tilt this down, because really I want these laying down, but not enough so that you can't read them. Again, this is a product shot, so we want to made sure we see the product. And I'm going to go ahead and move that down so it hits that floor. And maybe rotate it out just a bit. And I can probably rotate this down a little bit more, going to go ahead and hit local mode here. And again, enough so they seem like they are laying down but enough so you can read it. That's kind of a bit of a compromise here. And I'm searching between global and local mode just so I can get the rotation right. That looks about right, then I can change this as I set up the camera. But now that I have one of these in place, I can start duplicating them. So I'm going to hit Object, Duplicate, or I can hit CTRL D as my hotkey, and then move that back. Now once these arranged, so that they look a little random, I don't want them to be exactly aligned and, and locks step. So I want to make sure that these are kind of worn naturally arranged here, but just enough packets to know that there is multiple packets, in the container there. And then just take this other one and again, control-d is duplicate and we're going to go ahead and move that back and rotate it and maybe move it over again, and again, we just want something that looks fairly natural. So, maybe pull this one forward a little bit, a little bit over, and maybe this one isn't rotated exactly the way that we want. So, there we go. Okay, so that's a pretty good arrangement. That's a good start, we can always change this as we move forward. But just remember what we've done here is we've used a cube with a bevel to create a seamless backdrop, and then we've arranged our objects to get them ready for the camera.