How to Create a Realistic Mushroom House in Blender

The 18th CG Boost Challenge with the topic “Mushroom House” were successfully held with 233 submissions which show us all kinds of fairy tales with innocence and romance.

Mushroom village © Felipe Del Rio

With the strong modelling and great composition with the strong depth of field, Mushroom Village, made by Felipe Del Rio, won the first place of the challenge. It took Felipe around 2 weeks to finish the work between work and college tasks, which was created by using Blender, Cycles and Substance Designer. “It's a fantastic, vast yet microscopic world,” the jury said about the work.

Here’s the interview between Felipe and the TPN-Accredited cloud rendering services provider Fox Renderfarm, in which he talked about how he made the wonderful mushroom model and the background.

Felipe Del Rio
3D Freelancer Artist
From: Brazil
Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/felipedelrio

Fox Renderfarm: Hi Felipe! Could you give us a brief introduction about yourself?

Felipe: Hi, thank you for having me! My name is Felipe Del Rio, I’m a 3D artist from Brazil, currently working as a freelancer and I’m also a design student at São Paulo State University.

Fox Renderfarm: How do you feel about winning first place in the Mushroom House Challenge?

Felipe: I felt really happy and surprised because there was a lot of good artworks. And these kinds of recognition always make us motivated to keep learning and making 3D too. Also, I can’t wait to use the prizes on my future projects, so I think it’s double motivation!

Fox Renderfarm: What inspired you to come out with the idea of making the work Mushroom village?

Felipe: When I heard about the challenge and the theme, I immediately thought about creating a place I would like to live in, with a very peaceful mood by the river, magical, but relatable. As the mushroom house theme already has a bit of this magical mood, I wanted to make some mundane elements too like buckets on the ground and laundry hanging on clotheslines to make it more real-life relatable, so I came with the village ideia.

Fox Renderfarm: The mushroom village looks realistic and cute, could you tell us how you make the model and texture of the mushroom?

Felipe: I decided to take a procedural workflow for the mushrooms because it would be easier than sculpting if I had to change how they look later in the process and also because I thought it would be a cool challenge and opportunity to explore this kind of process.

So, I started with a simple base for the mushrooms with little polygons and I subdivided and added different displace textures for each part. Those textures were made in Substance Designer, when I had the details done with the displaces, I used these maps to generate the color maps too.

Fox Renderfarm: Did you meet any difficulties when creating this work? And how did you solve it?

Felipe: The blurred background because it costs some time to render properly. So making the adjustments, adding the plants and seeing how it looked was a bit challenging, but I decided to work on it early in the process, even before working on the mushrooms, so I wasn't running against the clock and I had more time to wait for the renders and making the adjustments until I was happy with the result.

Fox Renderfarm: What is the biggest advantage of Blender for you in 3D creation?

Felipe: I guess Blender being free kept my attention when I started learning 3D, because those softwares tends to be expensive. And even though I've been learning 3D for some years and I have tested a lot of different softwares, Blender keeps being my favorite. Its development keeps growing and everybody can participate because Blender is open source, you have a strong and active community with a bunch of great projects around the world and more and more studios are including Blender in its workflow, just good news!

Fox Renderfarm: Could you briefly share with us your education and work experience along your CG journey?

Felipe: I started learning 3D after I got curious about how 3D animated movies were made and I began watching online tutorials. My dream was creating an animated short film, I got lost how many times I tried to create a short alone and I failed because I had no idea how hard it is for one single person to make a film, even if it's just 1 minute long. But I tried a lot of times and I learned a lot of things, but it was just a hobby at that time.

In high school, I decided I wanted to work with digital art and I became a graphic design student at São Paulo State University. In the first year I created my first animated short film “CICLO” for a sociology class, I knew it had to be a really simple animation because I didn’t have so much time and I already knew from my past experience how hard is to make a whole short alone, but this time I managed to finish it and for my surprise I got it selected for some animation festival like the Anima Mundi from Brazil and Anima Latina from Argentina, also the Suzanne Festival in the Blender Conference.

The CGMeetup YouTube Channel also posted my short after I shared it and now it has about 8 million views which is something I never expected. After that, I was really motivated to keep learning 3D and I started getting my first commissions, now I’m fully working as a 3D freelancer artist and finishing my graduation.

Fox Renderfarm: Any other things you want to share with the CG enthusiasts?

Felipe: Learning CG doesn’t have to be frustrating and we should enjoy the process. If you think your art isn’t perfect, it only means you have a good aesthetic sense and your skills didn't reach it yet, but it's part of the process and that's what keeps us getting better, so enjoy it and have fun!

Not the right gift © Felipe Del Rio