Using Details To Make
Something Look Big By Neil Blevins Created On: Sept 27th 2014
There are many techniques to make something look big. But this tutorial
focuses on details, how you can make something look the correct size by
the size of the details, and conversely, how you can ruin the illusion
of scale using the wrong details.
You have two choices with this lesson, watch me discuss the issue in
the video below, or read the full text.
Lets start with a simple example, here are 2 rocks, a small one, and a
big one.
Now if I asked you which rock is the biggest, you'd of course answer
the one on the right. That's because you can directly compare the big
rock to the little rock, and the human figure. But something is not
right.
The problem is that the rock pattern on both rocks are the same size
relative to their rock. All I did was literally scale up the rock, both
the shape and details, and this leads to a visual problem.
Check out the following image as a better example...
So the house on the right is indeed the bigger house (same house, just
scaled up, details and all), but it doesn't
look in proper scale, because the doors and windows are the wrong size
for the human figure.
Either the house is some sort of imaginary house for giants, or
the house is normal sized and the person standing beside it has been
shrunk down with some sort of shrink ray. If you're trying to make a
large house in a normal sized world, just scaling the house up doesn't
work.
Here's another example...
When someone makes a small shirt and a large shirt of the same type,
they don't use a larger material for the larger shirt, they use the
same material, just more of it, so the overall detailed pattern remains
a constant size in both the small and big shirt relative to the world.
So again, just taking the small shirt and scaling up the shirt and the
pattern on the shirt doesn't work.
So the way to fix this issue is to remember, when the object gets
bigger, the details on the object do not get bigger, they tend to have
a similar size in relation to the world. This will give your objects a
proper sense of scale, and big things will actually feel big. As Pascal Blanche
said, "The Theory of the Lego Block", as in, when you need to make a
bigger house in lego, you don't use bigger bricks, you use more of the
same sized bricks.
So in our rock example, lets again do the 2 rocks, but instead of
scaling up the texture, lets leave the texture the same size relative
to the world.
This already looks a lot better.
Here's another example, placing a detail that we all know the size of
beside the rocks, in this case a ladder.
Because we know generally how big a ladder is (because we know
generally how far apart each rung is to allow a human body to climb),
the rock on the right seems very
large. This is why people frequently put man sized objects into scifi
scenes, whether it's an actual person, ladders, doors, windows, etc. We
know how big these are, so by comparing them to the scene
or character or whatever, we can tell how big something is.
Another example, we have a tree. If we want a bigger tree, it's not
just about scaling up the tree, it's about adding more branches...
So in general, to make something look big, remember to keep the "world"
size of details reasonably constant, even if the object gets larger and
larger. This means both 2d surface details (like the rock texture, or
the size of the thread that makes cloth) as well as 3d details, like if
you have two bolts, one that is an inch tall and one that's a foot
tall, don't use the same design for both, make a different bulkier
looking design for the big one.
If you follow this simple rule, your objects will look the correct
scale.
