My goal for this image was to get more comfortable with Blender and compose a visually interesting image in terms of scale and subject. I aimed for a cohesive, warm color scheme: an orange crab and umbrellas, cream shell, red sunset, and yellow bucket. I created the crab, shell, and sand dune terrain in Blender. I found the sunset picture and placed it on a plane in the distance. The house, rocks, trees, beach umbrellas were imported models.

For lighting, I continued to use the Epic shader I made a few weeks ago. The scene has a hemisphere, point, and directional light. Attenuation is implemented, but the radius is very large since it's an outdoors scene. I implemented Michael's displacement code to create more realistic depth on the crab, tree, rocks, and sand.

After the presentation, I added shadows to the sand and shell textures to add depth. I fixed problems with normals and subdivided and smoothed out the surfaces of the sand and shell. I also redid the UV map on the crab and shell so that seams from the textures weren't visible. I added legs and more detailed claws to the crab from a model I found online. I found a plastic sand bucket object to dramatize the scale of the house even more and to depict the scene in human terms. I felt the background was lacking, so I Photoshopped the silhouettes of seagulls to the background plane and added three beach umbrellas to the background (found the object online and created the striped texture).

I integrated Marianna's advice to improve the textures on the houses and how to angle the shell so it looked more like it was attached. I added rocks below the tree and the house in order to draw attention away from the simple intersection (i.e. how molding is used between floor and wall). Each object is shaded separately. I found it easier to control for shading and texture mapping this way compared to implementing MTL.

Although there are obviously more things I'd like to improve, I'm proud of how the image turned out and how much I've learned so far!