Showcase Sunday: Prodigal Project

This is from a personal concept art project I worked on a while back. Over time across #showcase-sunday posts I guess I'll slowly migrate more and more of my artwork into the OnChainArt Community. If you haven't checked it out yet you definitely should. Especially the Steempeak integration which is what I linked above. Subscribe and enjoy :)

Anyway, I want to go through some of the work I created for this project starting with this environment concept which was probably my favorite piece out of the batch.

It started with these thumbnails exploring the building design and lighting. Then I moved into some 3D explorations.

I've started with some quick thumbnail sketches to try to find a visual language for the aliens. They are humanoid so the design can look similar to humans, but more advanced, but I did want it to feel a bit alien, so this is some exploration.

As you can see I settled on the last one. After that I got into the actual painting. When I first shared this I showed a lot of the process including the raw 3D passes I created out of Cinema 4D.

The final result out of the 3D software was this

This is called a beauty pass. In 3D the different lighting and material elements can all be separated into layers. For visual effects, typically this is what is done. You then take those layers and put them together in a compositor, like After Effects, or in my case since I'm making a still image Photoshop works fine as well. A beauty pass is all the elements together.

Then there are the individual passes. You can render out many more types of passes, but for this I only needed, the Diffuse(color), Reflection, and Emission(lights). You can see them all below.

Diffuse

Reflection

Emission

Then there's the information passes. So in visual effects, you can use these information passes for a ton of various tasks, but for what I'm doing I'm using them for selections. With all this detail that the 3D produces, I can use these passes in a variety of ways to select different areas of the image.

Z-Depth

Normals

Object ID

Material ID

So I then take all that information out of the 3D software and bring it into Photoshop to start painting. You can see some of the process below.

I'll save some of the other pieces for future #showcase-sunday posts. Also I humbly ask for all you awesome Steem artists to help make OnChainArt a dope community, by posting your awesomeness in here. I'll be your best friend!

Anyway, hope you like. I'll see you all in the next post.