Druidic Fleshwood Staff

Key Responsibilities: Design, Modeling, Sculpting, Texturing, UV Mapping, Rendering, Lighting, Baking, Compositing, Video Editing

I have had an itch to create a very knobby, creepy looking staff for a long time and the other day I found the inspiration I needed in a very strange place.

I had cysts growing in my mouth for around a month earlier this year. I had; no idea the cause, still have no idea, and it was a wholly unpleasant experience. But, as with all bad experiences I got something out of it. The concept and shape of the cysts on the staff and their colour were based off of medical photos taken of said cysts. It is crazy where we get ideas from sometimes lol.

The staff's shape was hammered out in Maya and was based on a mix of a scythe and a shepherd's cane. I quickly moved into zBrush Core, where I sculpted the piece with a mouse and keyboard. (tablet was damaged while moving) I took heavy advantage of Lazy Mouse and used a lot of smoothing. This was time consuming, but very rewarding as the shape of the wood is one of my favourite aspects of the piece.

The model was retopologiezed using the zRemesher tool. Which in zBrush Core; leaves a lot to be desired. Therefore, it was necessary to do a good amount of touchup work in Maya to reduce the polycount to around 26k. This was about 6k higher my original goalpost, but this was a necessary change due to me adding more cysts and orbs. The UV's were created using the 3D Seem tool built into Maya's UV suite which let me create UVs that fit the curvature of the piece and could be hidden under the stips of cloth or in indentations in the wood where they would be less noticeable.

This was also a priority in the texturing process which was done in Substance Painter. I paid special attention to the seams and painted wood alphas perpendicular to them to help mask where they were. The more curvy, natural shape of the seams made this a lot easier to pull off. Sub surface scattering was a big part of what made the cysts work, but I also used it sparingly in the wood around the area the blighted sections to give the wood a feeling that the corruption had started to spread.

The animation was created in Maya. I rotated the group of red orbs and then animated them individually, moving them around the piece along the curvature of the wood with some variation to keep it interesting.

Final renderings were created in Marmoset taking advantage of a desert-like lighting setup to push the yellows and oranges in the piece. I felt like this complemented the predominantly red and white colours of texture well while not being too extreme and changing the colour pallet altogether.

The final backdrops were composited in Photoshop using stock images, generated fog effects and color toning.

Renderings were edited in Photoshop and Premiere to increase bloom slightly and emphasize lighting.