Doris, thank you so much for your very kind words! It is very much appreciated, and especially so since I look up to your art so much. I started sculpting because I found your work through the FXR’s Viggo thread, where you helped him and others so much, so it is not an exaggeration to say that without your influence I wouldn’t even be using Blender right now!
I’m very glad that you see the composition in the vegatation and columns, I tried to make everything have a purpose in the overall composition. I really tried to avoid adding things without reason. This was tricky to keep a rein on because I was really learning Blender at the same time, so the tempation to overdo something new that I had learned was quite strong. I had to keep reminding myself, “I’m learning how to do ‘x’ because I just want to do ‘y’ and nothing more.” I was attempting to make the background harmonious with the sculpture (since I didn’t really have too much control over the sculpture itself if I wanted it to look something like the real one). I wonder which aspects of this are obvious and which are subtle but supportive of composition, and which are innapropriate. I will sketch some of my ideas onto a picture later. I hope you like my mirroring of the theme by having the entire statue being entangled by its own serpents in the form of the vines growing over the pedestal
Yes, it was all on a Macbook Air, haha! It was fine at first, but I definitely hit a wall…that put a significant dent in my progress speed At the end it was taking about a minute to refresh the compositor with every single change, and the viewport was a nightmare…let’s not get started on render times lol.
Ok, the questions! Yes, I will provide some close ups. I could provide some other angles…but to be honest it is modelled to work with this perspective only. I did not sculpt the backside of the statues because that was never going to be visible according to my intending composition. In fact, Thymbraeus only has half a head, the other side is almost completely smooth! Antiphantes looks particularly bad from other angles, I couldn’t get it right at all, but given that I knew what my goal was I had to tell myself that achieving a great 3D sculpt from all angles was not actually condusive to my achieving that.
Laocoon, Thymbraeus and Antiphantes were posed base meshes and are all dyntopo. I could (or should) have gone to multires with bump maps, but the box mapping was actually proving to be quite nice, so I did not need to UV unwrap. The hair on the 3 statues, and Laocoon’s beard were all done using techniques you described to me The base mesh for the serpents were created from Bezier curves with a circle as the profile, and another bezier as the taper (so you get a long tube that can be posed, and thickness adjusted as required). These were then sculpted with dyntopo to get the ridges that spiral along the snake as it twist and turns. The cloth base mesh was created with the cloth simulated and then tweaked with proprortional editing and some sculpting.
The marble material is the result of testing out numerous marble materials that you, Michalis, and a few others have posted in various places on this forum, and then adjusting and tweaking for me needs. The marble is from CG textures, the cracks are a texture that I bought (first time I’ve felt the need to do that! I didn’t want to spend ages drawing my own, and the free ones were not quite working), and the grime is from CG textures decal section. I will post my nodes when I am back on the Mac. Essentially I have the diffuse consisting of the marble texture and a small multiplication of the cracks (to darken them), this is then mixed with SSS and a small amount of translucency. Gloss is added such that the cracks are diffuse, clean marble is a little reflective, and wet grime is more reflective. All controlled by fresnel.
The lighting is all mesh lights and spot lamps, no environment lighting. It is rather an elaborate set up to achieve what I wanted. It’s actually rather unrealistic, but I just wanted the image to be an aesthically pleasing, albeit an an aesthically pleasing lie! As long as it was not so unphysical that it detached the viewer from the image and made them think about how the lighting didn’t look quite “real”. I will post some pics of the set up soon.
There are 4 render layers:
- All the objects (sculptures, vegeation etc) lit by the lighting rig on layer 2
- The volumetric lighting on layer 3 that is affected by the existence of the objects in pass 1, and also a mesh near the light source that is supposed to create some striations in the light. However, the striations were lost at the higher sample count - I didn’t realise this until it was too late. Shame since these were part of the composition too. The cone of light was supposed to have two slightly shadowed sections that fell between the Laocoon and his two sons, so that they each had a spot light of sorts. I will post a pic soon.
- Dust - fairly subtle, but it’s visible in the beam of light if you look closely. This is just a bit box of particles using a group of dust objects I created. Same lighting as the volumetric pass, but composited seperately to give me more control.
- Mist - the mist was a smoke sim in Blender Internal. the result was similar to the volumetric pass in cycles in that the scene objects obscured the mist, but were not rendered themselves. That seemed like the best way to composite it in to me anyway. I’m sure there were better ways though.
Thanks again! Very happy that you like it
More info to come!