Low Poly Scenes Made Easy
Low poly scenes are the perfect finishing touch for any website — they’re sleek, modern, cute, and imbue a sense of creative sophistication on any website or graphic design.
This is a short tutorial on how to make the perfect low poly scenes easily for your web development and branding projects.
What should low poly look like?
Low poly scenes should rely on the abstract, use minimal texturing, and rely on the geometry and single color polygons to create a 3D version of “pixel” art, but unlike Minecraft, the models are polygonal and not cubic.
Here’s a link to a website I made for a residential building service:
I used a variety of low poly scenes to illustrate the services Atlantic Butler offers. Like dog walking and mail service.
Do I need to be a model maker?
No! In fact, all of my models came from one of the following sites:
You must credit the creator — and not doing so is a jerk move — so I included a thank you at the footer of my site.
These are my go-to sites for a variety of free low poly models. My only job is to arrange the models, then render them.
Ok, I have some models I want to stage, now what?
Import your models into a rendering / arranging software! I prefer Adobe Dimension — it’s included in my Creative Cloud subscription, and it has all the essential tools to get the job done.
It also now lets you render in the cloud, which save a ton of time!
Arranging the models
Import all your models into Dimension, then do the following:
- Scale them to the right proportion you want
- Move them to the right distance from each other
- Change the canvas size to your desired output
- Move the camera to create a view you like and bookmark it
- If you want, apply render-ready materials to individual models or panels
- Set your lighting to create the light and shadow you want
- Set your background color (I used a soft gray #E5E5E5 for Atlantic Butler)
- Render in the cloud or use your own GPU
Rendering without material effects is much faster, so to add a glass effect to this taxi, I rendered in the cloud. All my other renderings where done with my own hardware:
Your render will be saved as a PSD or PNG. You can choose before you render which type you’d like, and I always pick PSD.
A layered PSD can always become a flat PNG, but a flat PNG can’t become a layered PSD.
Here’s what a finished scene looks like:
That’s it!
Good luck, have fun, and try this simple method on a future site or project. It’s easy and fast!
