Band Art: Burials

[pwny_fluff169]

Hi there great to be a part of this forum and using blender!

I’ve been asked to do some promotional artwork and am trying to create the concept directly in blender
to finish post render in 2d. As since my tablet is currently out of service, I figured it would be interesting working up a rough idea in 3d. I’ve been given a simple prompt: buried alive, rather obvious direction considering the band name, still quite ‘open’ as an image but fairly unambiguous, which for me is good.

so far I’ve created this simple (fairly generic) model and armature and have been torturing it various ways to see how I might have it emerge from the earth breaking out of soil, focusing on communicating the feel in the basic pose and facial expression.

I want to keep the design overall simple and unfussed. Camera fov and angle are big considerations, i want the image to be interesting and fairly detailed for an ep cover but able to be easily reproduced and identified in small formats, eg myspace etc. have also been given a hand drawn font of the band name to bring into vector and stylise to some extent- will post this to put it into context when I make some headway with the text.Am looking at different options to create earth soil and rocks including freezing instances of the fluid simulator at different viscosities for displacement and texturing, jittered particles for stones and some sort of procedural root creation (although these sorts of details will be kept to a minimum to highlight the figure emerging from the ground which will remain more symbolic in form than representational.)

I took to doing screen caps rather than taking renders into gimp to play with the shading, as I couldnt avoid rendering
poled verticies (obviously this is going to be a problem since I want to get it into print), is there some way to avoid render artifacts with blenders internal renderer or adjust the smoothing angle ? or u should I stick with a perfectly contiguous, rudimentarily rought quadrangle mesh?:evilgrin: thanks in advance

[kbot]

For a band name “Buried Alive” I think you are onto a great start regarding this as concept art. The render already has some qualities that as I as a more conservative member of society would definately want to avoid to this fine and up coming musical score contenders. Keep it up!

[pwny_fluff169]

ok so I have a little feedback from the band, and am now focussing on an a promotional banner of sorts, print considerations have been somewhat sidelined. Have had little time with the the text, but trying to generate the overall feel with texture and lighting. Still b/w at this stage. I’m looking at burials in not such a literal sense, but figuratively as indicative of the modern state of being. The word ‘burials’ very much cononotes for me a sense of feeling buried by the masses of information out there at this time, as well as the isolation and feelings of being generic, of relative unimportance that I think we all go through at some point. anyhow here is a little progress with the addition of some drawn textures in gimp

kbot: thanks for your positive remarks

[pwny_fluff169]

latent update: worked with some ideas to bring out a strong composition from all textural information, yes i do notice the cheap aliased edges on the wireframe screen cap, i like to think they and the unfinished mouse strokes add ‘sparkle’ and give a more matrix lattice affect to tie in with the technological side if the theme, but i’m open to design criticism. as before textures drawn in gimp and several selective blur passes: