blender world cup

The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me.  On top of moving into a new house in September, I got married in October!  After months and months of planning the big day finally arrived and we couldn’t have asked for a better wedding.

In addition to those two huge life changes, I decided to enter this years Blender World Cup.  This is the first year that I felt like I had a sufficient amount of knowledge to create an entry I was proud of.  Although I didn’t finish the piece as much as I would have liked to (which is understandable given all the other more important things going on for me!), I did manage to create a finished piece that I’m pretty satisfied with.  This was certainly my most ambitious blender project to date and probably my most advanced one.  Here is how the entry came about:

This year’s world cup topic was “The Other World.”  This topic really leaves a lot of room for creative freedom.  I was fascinated by the mystery behind this phrase and wanted to come up with something that left some questions unanswered and open to interpretation.  My thoughts were to make some sort of gateway or opening to “the other world,” but not actually show the viewer what was out there.

I wanted this gate to be in some sort of huge primeval forest, with massive trees all around.  I also wanted the gate to be guarded by a really large epic statue.  Here are a couple of quick concept sketches:

I chose a huge strange looking gorilla crab type thing as my statue.  This was influenced by a piece of concept art that I saw a long time ago, but wasn’t able to find again unfortunately.  The first concept sketch above was similar to what I was aiming for.  The first step was to obviously model this statue.  Here are some WIP snapshots of the statue:

I wanted the statue to look like an old weathered stone, so I needed a really rough surface.  I decided to experiment with blender’s sculpt tool for the first time and I’m pretty pleased with the result.  Although I would have liked the cracks to be a little bit more evident, I think it came out pretty well for my first attempt (and my limited computing power!).

I now needed a “hero” in the scene, along with a nice compositional setup.  I actually used my silver surfer model as my hero and I worked the composition out in order to stress the size of the statue.  I attempted to follow the “Golden Spiral” for my composition.

The next step was to start populating the scene with some massive trees and some big exotic plants.  I started by adding some trees and vines, then went ahead and added a bunch of moss and some plants.  I also played around with some materials at this stage.

Finally, it was time to start playing with some lighting and more materials.

I was fairly quickly running out of time by this point, so after a lot of additional tweaking my final entry is below.

Like I said before, I’m pretty satisfied with it and think that it is one of my best pieces to date.  There are quite a number of things that could be changed or fixed on it, but it was nice to have a deadline to stop the never ending refinements!  If you want to delve deeper into the progress of this image, please have a look at my wip thread on the blender artists forum here.

Hopefully now that everything is getting slightly less hectic I’ll have more time to add some updates here.  There are a couple of more projects that I’m working on already, so keep yours eyes out!