Behind The Scenes: Ancient Portal

It's not always easy to come up with a new design every week. That's why I keep the list of all ideas and pick the right one, when the time comes. But how do these items get on the list?

Sometimes it's a suggestion in a comment section on YouTube. Other times, watching movies, or playing games inspire me to write something down. This one came to be while browsing through my older works. I've made a Stargate diorama once and came upon it later. I thought it looked great, balancing the rounded and sharp shapes while offering a distinct focus element and lighting.

It was about a time I was working on the cyber ruins diorama and it clicked in right away. I immediately wrote down the idea of stone ancient portal brought to life by technology.

As you can see, even though these ideas look pretty straightforward sometimes, their lifecycle can take months, even years until fruition. That's why it's essential to work consistently and let the ideas stack up and work their magic.

Visit the full Pinboard here

I've started as always by creating a Pinterest board and gathering some sources. I had a pretty clear picture in my mind, but when you start thinking about specifics, you will always find a lot of holes.

For example I knew I want conduit or antenna there, but how does it look like? Is it a satellite dish or something else? And how does the control panel look like? Does it have buttons? Or levers?

The more of the details you leave out in the preparation stage, the more of them will bite you in production in form of prolonged modeling times and pauses. I like to get into flow and work, that's why I want specifics beforehand.

I started the sketch by blocking out the circular shape of the portal in place and figuring out, where the stairs and other scaffolds would go. I filled in some smaller details like tree trunk and stones to make the composition more interesting and to create these clumps of elements, so that the distribution of objects is pleasing to look at.

When it came to refine some of the sketches, I heavily relied on my board and tried to find interesting details. For example the portal was supposed to be made out of stony rings, but after stumbling upon the portal made out of these floating stone blocks, it was decided. I just found some rune alphabet to make them more sophisticated.

Same is true about the antenna, found on some game concept art. I really loved the sci-fi shape made out of these blades, so I replaced the dish. After filling out some tertiary details like cables, pipes and foliage, the sketch was ready.

What I saw right away, was that the main challenges of the scene will be composition (too busy) and lighting (focus). Preparing on something like this beforehand can save you a lot of trouble, when you're trying to light your scene and and can't figure out, why it doesn't work.

I solved the first, by moving the antenna, thus clearing out the space in front of the portal. The second was just a reminder, to keep the lights on a leash and to try to let the portal FX do the most of the lighting work to keep it in focus.

You can watch the process video on Youtube