Update 1

During the first week of the quarter, I started work on my environment. I created a basic block-out of the cabin. I also placed some cylinder primitives in place of trees. After experimenting with the placement of the trees and the overall composition of the scene, I decided that it just was not working.

So, I decided to shift gears a little bit and remove the cabin from my scene entirely. I still wanted to play with the theme of the cold environment mixed with the warm. Instead of the cabin, I decided to create a smaller object in the scene that would work as the weather controlling machine instead of the cabin.

To go along with the new idea, I wanted to find a better reference image of a forest that I could use for my changed scene. After some looking around, I finally found a photo that I was happy with. This is the new reference that I chose.