Personnal Projects | Darker Visions | Lookdev

INTRODUCTION 

Hello and first of all thanks for looking at my entry for The Rookies contest. I'd like to present the major projects I've been able to do over the last few months and which I like best or which I've had time to finish.

I'm quite happy with the work I'm presenting because I feel that through it I've managed to develop my visual and creative identity a lot more.

I feed enormously on visuals, images or any media that can stimulate my creativity, and for these projects I've tried to focus on a darker universe. It's perhaps something that tends to be less appealing by nature, but I think that through a more disturbing or frightening visual, you can also share melancholy, or a kind of fascination with incomprehension.

At least that's what I've tried to show through my work, and I hope you'll enjoy these images as much as I've enjoyed making them.

P1 - SHUNNED

It's probably the project I've spent the most time on and planned the least.

I was working on another project that I've since abandoned. The aim was to create a perfectly deformed creature. But after several weeks of sculpting, it didn't work, not because I thought the idea was bad, but because I simply didn't like the shape.

So I spent most of the night sculpting without really thinking about what I was doing.

In every place that seemed empty, I added a tendon, a muscle, a bone or an artery. Finally, here's the creature that emerged.

The texturing process was quite long. First, because several time I wanted to add more details in the displacement which means a lot of back and forth between sculpting and surfacing.

I also spent a lot of time to find the right color palette I liked for the skin. I was constantly adding new layers to add details everywhere to make every part of the body "visually interesting".

During the compositing process, I chose to use a directional blur to accentuate the lines of the body, adding grain to the image.

The reason I went for a fairly pale, low-saturation lighting is because I wanted to have fun with the colors and find, during the compositing process, the mood that I liked best and that would best suit the idea I had of the project.

P2 - FISH_NEEDS_FIRE

This projet came out just by watching MonkFish pictures. I think in some way they are quite fascinating, at least as much as they are scary.

They swim alone in the darkest place of the Ocean with, as only light the bulb they have on their heads. So I decided to give my vision of a robotic MonkFish, with a human face (because why not).

Most of the time when I start a project I don't know where I'm going. It may be not the most optimized way to work for sure but I like to create during each time of the process thinking about new things to add, and it is how the idea of a Human Face on a Robotic creature came out.

The first step of the process was of course modeling and sculpting. It was for me one of the first occasion to sculpt from scratch a human face (even if it only the front part).

As all my personnal project (because I'm not a rigger) all my characters are sculpted in pose which can make the retopology process a bit longer as I really want to keep a nice topology that must follow the details of the displacement / sculpt.

While I was working on this project, I had already a rough idea of the kind of images I wanted to render, but in the end the images you can see in that entry are totally different. The overall idea of having a kind of divine light coming from above was due to a mistake during rendering, and it is from that mistake that I decided to create the overall identity of the mood I wanted in my lighting.

P3 - HeadSquared

This project is a bit special to me, first of all because it is coming from a drawing I've done two or three years ago. While I was working on the sculpt first, I thinked that it would be nice to use an artistic direction that was a bit different to me, and which I have often admired in other artists projects.

After I sculpted the model it was the time to find a way to create a Hand Painted effect / Brush Stroke effect.

Some things that you can easily create in softwares like photoshop but I wanted to paint the textures first, and then I really wanted to have 3D created brush strokes.

And the easiest way to do this is using Plane Scattering

To create that brush stroke effect in rendering some adjustement needs to be done in texturing, to have in the mean time the alpha of the brush stroke you want and the same shading than the mesh under.

We also want the brush strokes to exceed on the side of your mesh to break the shape but we don't want them to be too much visible on the other parts of the character (remove shadow, less light influence...)

This project was interesting because it was a personnal way to experiment something that I can do at school during my Final School Project in ESMA with a group of friend, in a less advanced way and a bit more personnal, with my kind of sculpting for instance. It was a great way to try hand painted textures, something that I could try later in other personnal projects.

P4 - RECURENCE

The idea of that project came out by watching a photomontage, showing an eye coming out from a woman's mouth. And I remember being thinking "what if...", which most of the time is a nice way to find ideas to me:

"What if an head was coming out from an head, which was coming out from an head..."

I think it is by doing FISH_NEEDS_FIRE and RECURENCE that I really developed my passion for sculpting. This one was really a challenge for two main reasons:

1 - I sculpted (as always) all the faces in pose because I don't know how to rig 

2 - I had to keep the same level of detail on three faces, which are very different in size (for movement but also for texturing).

It was from this project that I decided to integrate important image degradations into my renders. I'm aware that on one hand, I'm erasing some details that I've spent hours sculpting, or painting.

But I have a real fascination for images with a lot of noise, or motion blur. In some cases this can be due to a lack of control, or an accident but to me it really make the image much more interesting and beautyful, especially when it is a bit too much.

I attach more importance to the visual aspect of my images than to the technical details they present, even if I've spent weeks making them.

Thanks for watching !

I hope you've enjoyed my work and that I've managed to draw you into the visual universe I'm trying to convey through my work.

Remember to put a little High Five under this post to support me, and thank you for watching/reading my contest entry.