Another study of a boy. I’m spending a little time letting the river run it’s course and doing some ground work for a future project. I’m not expecting to begin work on it properly for a few years so I’m just planting a few seeds to let it grow subconsciously.
Click to see full size.
This was created using Adobe Photoshop with a few custom brushes. The picture of the boy was from one of my favourite magazines… The absurb and eclectic Permanent Food.
Another concept image of Horstmann within his environment. This one is made up of twenty or so other images that have been sliced up, masked, transformed and merged into one image. I have also worked into the image with Photoshops painting tools. I think this image is lacking some detail around the periphery but overall it’s beginning to take shape. The coloured tendrils stand out really well despite the deep blue saturation within the shadows and darker areas.
Click for larger image.
This is the finished model of Horstmann… It’s not a particularly complex model and the UVW mapping is also pretty straight forward. This is rendered with a very standard HDRI reflecting background and one-click lighting solution just for demonstrating the model without any special materials applied to it.
Well, as lovely as he looks with his polished glossy surface, it isn’t really the right look for the lamp in the story. Horstmann is old, he’s alone and he needs to look weathered by time.
I have a large collection of reference imagery of the Horstmann and Hadrill lamp and a good amount in battered and bruised condition, which is helpful to get achieve a certain amount of realism when making the textures. I’ve also got a good library of sourced imagery of metals either found on the internet from places like Mayangs free textures or photographed by myself.
Here you can see the texture map for the diffuse colour being built using a number of different source images and a good image of an old lamp to refer to. The UV template is used along with some added notes to guide where to place scatches or built-up dirt and I try to keep the layers seperate to help with the building of specular and bump maps.
Here’s some progress test renders of the diffuse colour map. I have a simple bump map on here as well but this will be worked on properly once the diffuse colour map is looking how I want it, as will the specular and gloss maps.
This is a portrait of Philip Glass… His work has inspired me through many pairs of shoes and his track ‘Cue 2B (Piano)’ from the Candyman soundtrack is the main inspiration behind ‘A Seige of Colour‘. The idea for the film was originally a kind of visual interpretation of this piece but seems to have continually grown beyond the timings of the music and may need something original writing specifically for the film… Perhaps using this piece as a starting point.
Anyway… The image above was digitally painted in Adobe Photoshop using a couple of standard brushes and a Wacom graphics tablet, it took approximately 3 jugs of coffee from start to finish. The main reason for doing it was to take my mind off the visual treatment of the butterfly and completely focus it on something else… “Maybe I can’t see the wood for the trees” I mutter to myself. Well… I think I’ll start thinking about the butterfly again tomorrow, hopefully the back of my mind will have had some ideas.
Feel free to download the high-res version here:
http://www.luniere.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/portrait-of-philip-glass-by-aaron-bradbury.jpg
Portrait of Philip Glass by Aaron Bradbury is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
The glowing tip of a gentlemans cigarette whispered a few ideas… “Why not?” he said… “Well maybe I will” I muttered with soft regard… And here are a few concept ideas for ‘La Smokey Trails’.
The above three images were produced using Photoshop. I’ve used a reference image off the web as a background image (blurred for a little depth). The butterfly is from a previous test render, which has been rotated and sheared for a better angle. The smoke has been produced with a mix of painting and smudging techniques and built up with additive layering.
The idea is that the butterfly and background remain the same so I can focus on residual form of the butterfly. These examples are variations of a smokey trail left by the butterfly as it waltzes through the air… Hmmm… I like them… I think I need to work on some that are less ethereal… More of a solid edge, maybe try out some liquid or ink like versions. All of these ideas are easy to produce in 2D but trying to animate these in 3D is going to be a little more complicated. If I go with the smokey trails I’ll probably be using FumeFX in 3ds Max, if the inky spill works well I might say hello to Realflow for some liquid lovliness… It’s been a while.
We cast our net into the digital ocean and dredge it clean of colour… Searching for the right kind of reference imagery can sometimes be a drawn out affair… To model something accurately you might need multiple viewpoints and a variety of distant and close-ups… I got a few butterfly shots last summer but the amount of butterfly imagery on the internet is unsurprisingly vast.
For any project I think it’s important to begin with, and continue collecting reference imagery. I like to collate the imagery into a sort-of contact sheet and quite often manipulate these as a form of experimentation. This can sometimes throw up some interesting ideas or methods that can carry through into the final project but mostly it’s a good way to immerse yourself in different aspects of the project and get acquainted with the subject matter.
For this image I’ve taken the contact sheet above and basically got a bit filthy in Photoshop for an hour. It’s got multiple versions of the butterfly layers with different filters and blending modes. I’ve worked into it with some floral brushes, added some vector blossoms, overlaid some photos and previously made artwork but most importantly treated each cell with a different colour palette. This is one of a few different colour exercises I’ve been working on.
Colour has always been a huge element in all of my projects, although it’s normally stripped away to almost nothing… A lack of colour is still carefully contemplated. ‘The Fool’ is almost completely desaturated, the amount of colour and the grade continually changed throughout the production until the final moments. Many hours of subtle tinkering led to slightest of reddened shadows and green tinted highlights and on first glance appears completely devoid of colour… I feel it’s very much a subliminal difference that it has on the film overall, it’s not obvious enough to notice but gives it a warmth without detracting from the texture and form of the… well without sounding too much like a wine taster… colour is very important. A Siege of Colour requires more than I’m usually comfortable with… So I’m thinking about it… a lot.
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