A Walk Down a Fantastical Pathway

Key Responsibilities:

Design, Layout, Obtaining Pre-made Assets, Low/High Poly Modeling (Sword Only), Texture Creation/Editing, Baking, Lighting, Rendering, UV Mapping, Post-Production Editing, Compositing, AI Image Generation/Editing, Volumetrics

Work In Progress Post:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/eJqXnD

Personal, 2022

This Blender scene was a personal project that I wanted to create to combine my own work in an environment with the work of other artists. It was also a chance to learn some new skills with compositing, volumetrics, and Cycles. The sword is another recent project of mine, all other 3D assets are modified Quixel Megascans. Said changed were made with with Substance Painter, Photoshop, or Blender's own texture node system, whichever was more appropriate for the given asset.

The scene was created in Blender using Quixel's Bridge software to quickly and easily move assets from my Megascans Library into the scene for quick placing. I knew from the beginning that I wanted something with more of a fantasy bend and while Quixel's asset library is incredible, the objects are rather mundane as delivered.

I took Quixel's textures into Photoshop and isolated the areas that I wanted to glow in order to create an emissive map. The end result was a little too simplistic, so I took to Substance Painter. Creating a file containing several of the plants, I was able to create working maps. (Thickness/AO/ect.) using Marmoset that would allow me to more effectively and creatively retexture the plants. This is how I created the colour gradients and glowing veins present in the flowers and mushrooms respectively. Because it was all in one file, it also went much faster than if I had worked on them individually. From there I modified the mesh of some of the mushrooms to make them look a bit more distinct from one another and created an additional few materials with different Hue/Saturation nodes attached to their Albedos to create colour variety.

The clouds were created using volumetrics in Cycles and lit using a series of three small point lights in order to simulate additional light shining through the clouds that the sun did not produce by default.

The backdrop was created using a stock image of a night sky, overlayed by a linear add layer containing a gradient that would help simulate the location of the sun. AI Generator Dall-E was used to create a fractal image that I distorted in Photoshop to create the aurora-like effects. This can also be achieved in engine using particles/being baked into the skybox, but I am always wanting to try new things. I dream of the perfect AI CubeMap generator. The larger stars were created using a noise layer, isolating a very small amount of colour and purging the rest before blurring. Bloom was then added to the plants in post.

The image was rendered in sections as shown in the video above and composited partially in Blender with work also being done in Photoshop post final render to save time.

I created the final video in Premier to show off the creative process and the composition in a more quick, exciting way than a few photographs. The particle effect was created by editing a stock video clip of the embers released from a campfire.