Welcome to the production log for a highly detailed, painterly environment tentatively titled "Lost Trinity".
Concept: A giant mechanical orb of some type sitting out of place in a painterly cave landscape.
-Gathered plenty of reference and came up with the following images to base the environment from:
-Created a concept render of the Cave for pre-vis and planning purposes:
-experimented with various rendering a zbrush techniques:
-Decided re-using the same concept model is a bad move because of the extremely wide camera used.. Going to have to remodel everything and split of the geometry accordingly. My plan is to first model everything using basic primitives first and then create geometry on top of that with proper edge flow.
-Here's a wip of that process:
-Still continuing work blocking out the major shapes. It's a slightly long process of drawing geo on top of the model using splines. But this will allow UV mapping to go by quick and have a proper organic flow. Here's an image of the technique I'm using:
-Continuing work on creating the proper topology.
-Completed the base proxy mesh, now ready for Zbrush work:
Class 7
-I began importing the models into Zbrush and am currently experimenting with various detail creation methods
-Below is an example of 3 chunks of the Cave completed in Zbrush, ready for normal map creation:
Class 8
-Continuing work on Zbrushing the other chunks of the cave.. .
Class 9
-Completed Zbrushing the entire Cave, moving onto texturing the cave.
-Below is the chunked-up Zbrushed without detail normal maps:
Class 10
-Began texturing the cave
-Below is a breakdown the hole chunk texture:
Class 11
-The cave is completely textured and I'm begriming to work on materials.
-Below is an image of a material experiment:
Class 12
-Beginning work on the Orb which I'm deciding is going to be a 40's era Atomic Bomb.
-Below is a wip of the bomb so far.
Class 13
-I'm continuing modeling the bomb:
Class 14
-The bomb is complete, now I'm working on UVs.
Class 15
-UVing complete.
-Working on the material for the bomb:
Class 16
-Beginning to setup lights and tweak materials to balance with Brazil lights.
Class 17
-Lights placed. Here's an image of the lighting setup with a diffuse material on everything (no normal maps):
Class 18
-Beginning to render my different passes.
-Here's an ambient occlusion pass:
Class 19
-All passes have completed rendering:
Class 20
-Passes composited, color corrected and final tweaks made.
-Project complete, here's a 2k render of the environment:
Please click here for the hi-res image.