Gabby’s English Home – 3D Modelled in Blender

“A house is not a home without a dog”

Gerald Durrell

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I wanted to make this film close to home for me, and I grew up surrounded by English countryside. I took reference from typical Georgian architecture, from country living magazines and mashed a few house concepts together.

I wanted Gabby to live in this typical British country house surrounded by gardens, and land that her family could run a dog agility and training business on. I didn’t want it to be a whole farm, but farm or country house-like enough to get the gist across that they were an upper to middle-class family with a fair amount of land.

I have never modelled a building before… apart from a horrible gingerbread house which was the first thing I ever modelled with primitives in Blender.

It took about a month of work, and I realised that the Archimesh Add-on in Blender is extremely quick at adding simple windows and doors. The textures were free ones from Textures.com and to be honest I am considering texturing the house later on myself in Substance Painter but for now I feel that I have a good enough model to start with.

I blocked out the initial concept in Blender with primitives first. It was a starting point.

I really liked the shutters on the original house reference I picked, with the Georgian porch. There was still something wrong with the model. It also looked weirdly familiar and I realised that my family home and the others on the street I grew up on looked a lot like it.

And it was! Pretty scary how my subconscious told me that that is what a typical English house looks like… They are all different, from so many different periods of time but this is what I jumped to. So I decided to go in full swing and use the houses I found on my street in Google Streetview as reference to Gabby’s house.

I liked the bay windows, the chimneys, the porch. The overall size needed to change to match the human reference. I even changed the texture colours. I enjoyed making my own back of the house and added a big garage. The house interior had to fit with the shots from the rooms I had already storyboarded in the first scene.

Graswald 3D made my Blender a bit crashy at first on 2.9.2 but after I updated to Blender 3.0 a number of issues went away. Graswald 3D is an incredible tool to build grass and organic models into your scene. I used the new Ivy generator in Blender to create ivy with geometry nodes and Blender’s Sapling Addon to add and a couple of trees.

And this is my final result for now!

It is a completely empty house… but now that I know what the outside of the house looks like, I can work on building the interior rooms.

I am really proud of how far this project has come as it takes a lot of time to research and learn the programs in order to get it right. I know I’m still not there yet but every model I research, design and make brings me closer.

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Stay tuned for more progress towards Gabby’s film!

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This is not an affiliate post for Blender, Blender is a free and an open source software and it’s brilliant.

This is not an affiliate post for Graswald 3D, it is an amazing add-on and I highly recommend it.

All works shown here were designed, modelled, textured and rendered in Blender and Adobe Photoshop by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby’s house was inspired by real life photographs of English houses.

Images of work owned and copyrighted by Brawni3D and you must request permission prior to use.

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