Preparation - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 23

Figure 3-4: Silhouette of the Bat Creature Figure 3-5: Spider concept art. Because the legs are very complex, the

design of the body is kept simple to make it easier for the viewer to
understand the overall image.

which is by placement: Simply leave space between
the complex areas in your scene. But there are other
ways, too. For example, you can use lighting to put
less important areas of a composition in darkness
or to overexpose those areas so that they are mostly
white, or you can use depth of field to put fore-
ground and background areas of the image out of
focus. (We'll touch on these techniques in various
chapters, especially in Chapters 13 and 14.)

Simplicity and Focus
When creating any image, you should strive to con-
trol the viewer's gaze. If your image is busy with too
much going on, a viewer may be overwhelmed and
not know what to pay attention to. To avoid poten-
tial confusion, an image should have some “rest”
areas—parts that are simple and don't demand
attention so that other, more important parts are
not overlooked. For example, if you model and tex-
ture a fantastic portrait, you might avoid putting a
complex, cluttered background in the negative space
behind the portrait because this background might
distract the viewer. The negative space in this exam-
ple is the rest area, but rest areas may simply be less
complex and detailed parts of the main image itself.
The same idea applies to all aspects of design:
Keep things simple and control the viewer's focus.
If you cover the whole of any object in elaborate
detail, the result may be an indecipherable mélange
of competing focal points. If instead you focus the
details in specific areas while keeping others simple,
the viewer can more easily understand your design.
For example, in the Spider Bot project shown in
Figure 3-5, some aspects of the design, like the legs
and the mechanical details of the joints between the
body segments, are quite detailed, while other areas,
like the surface of the body, are kept simple.
Defining areas of focus and simplicity can be
accomplished in many ways, the most obvious of

Visual Path
Most images contain multiple elements. When work-
ing with such an image, you should create a path
that draws viewers through each element before they
look away from the image. By planning this path,
you can make your image tell a story and expose
more of your scene.
You can use the rule of thirds to create a visual
path through an image, as the viewer will naturally
look to the intersections of the rule of thirds lines
first. You can also use perspective, allowing converg-
ing lines in the image to direct the viewer through
your composition's various focal points. Or you
might frame the points of interest with negative
space. In images containing characters, you might
have the characters look at the focal point so that
the viewer follows their gaze, or you might even just
have the characters point at it!