Tranquility Before The Storm - Breakdown

Texture examples: Cloud

Texture examples: Character

Texture examples: Rock

The entire project was built, animated, and rendered in Maya viewport. Here is a bird's eye view of its setup.

This is a rough breakdown of my workflow. As I have mentioned before, I try not to make design decisions while doing 3D modeling and relying heavily on 2D paintovers to move the project forward.

Original Concept_Front

Original Concept_Back

Blockout: The goal is to quickly visualize the scene with some super rough geometries.

After the initial 3D blockout, I did some paintovers to flash out the in-between space bridging the front and back.

Early production phase: This phase aims to get the 3D models to 80-90%, Unwrap the UVs, and put in some rough textures.

I did two paintovers for the front and the back views before starting on the beauty pass. It is a great way for me to figure out a battle plan before diving too deep into rendering textures.

Before & After

As usual, I did most of my texture polish work in 3DCoat.

After the beauty pass phase, I showed the WIP work to my friend Igor Artyomenko. He recommended I break up the cloud shapes and add more depth to the scene by brightening the foreground and darkening the backgrounds. I adjusted some textures accordingly.

Here is another paintover I did before adding the final touches to the textures.

Before & After

It is difficult for me to decide where to push the image sometimes. For example, I was at one point consider adding a world tree type visual interest but eventually decided to take it out because it is taking attention away from the main focal point.

Let's call it done! ^^ I know it still has a lot of room to improve, but I have learned a lot in this process and had so much fun! I hope you have enjoyed this little sharing. Now on to the next piece~