smorbee

Neptune Gardening 4k renders and Behind the scenes!

Added 2021-08-11 20:45:19 +0000 UTC

Hello!! This was a fun little piece I threw together when i had sudden inspiration while working on the Neptune avatar model! I've wanted to do something with claymation aesthetic for a long, long time but never really had a specific idea I wanted to do until recently;;

Here's a look at the star itself, clay neptune!

This model is unrelated to the model being made for the avatar which will be of a similar visual style as what the phonodroids are and will have much more detail. This was forked off from the base sculpt i used for it's body where i intentionally added imperfections to it to make it look more like a rough clay sculpt made by hand!

Those of you with a keen eye might have noticed as well the slight thumbprints added to the texture to complete the look of it being hand made;;

As for the scene itself, i wanted to go with a more paper-like aesthetic to continue with the "craft" look to it all. I wanted to do more stuff out of clay but It would be a lot of work and I just wanted to make this pretty quickly so I may save that for a future render instead. The neptune clay model is fully riggable after all, so I can use them for future projects too!

the most interesting part of the background scene (and the most fun to work on), is how the perspective is Completely Fake. To better demonstrate what i mean, heres some orthographic shots where camera perspective should have no effect on the size of objects.

The entire perspective is hand crafted specifically for the angle the camera was in, specifically done because i wanted to give the world a slightly "off" look. Things are just slightly distorted in unrealistic ways. I also wanted Neptune itself to be viewed under a low field of view camera to give them a smaller more toy-like appearance while giving the world a higher one. And all that aside, I just love doing forced perspective stuff, it is extremely fun to do!

The other interesting thing I want to talk about is the ferns. These were a fairly last minute addition when i was trying to figure out what I wanted to add to make it feel "complete", I figured adding some real plants would contrast well with the plastic and paper look of everything else on screen!

They look quite complicated, but they were actually extremely simple to make. I started with a single tiny leaf of the leaf of the leaf and did my favorite trick of adding an array modifier to it and making it follow a curve to make the sub leaves of the main one. Then when that was done i repeated that again for the big leaf! I really do use that trick in every 3d thing i make pretty much.

Lastly, the lighting of the scene. Its not too out there for what i usually do, but hey its worth mentioning for those curious about doing this kind of stuff themselves! I like to stick to lighting scenes in ways that would be used for actual indoor scene lighting in real life, so I use a lot of large emissive panels and let the raytracing do all the work. This one was no different.

On the day lighting i used a bright sun light with some very rough point lights placed around to focus the light on the character, and giant blue emissive panel to give that slight blue hue to everything. For the sunset and morning lighting i used a second one to add lots of orange into the mix!

The night lighting is actually my personal favorite and im kicking myself for not posting it as the main render on twitter because the morning one i used for the post is probably my least favorite overall :p

This one is basically the same as the day lighting with the sun light removed, so all the light comes from the point lights and the big blue emissive panel.

There is also an unused "midnight" lighting I ended up cutting out because i wasnt too happy with it and i thought it was too redundant/too dark next to the normal night lighting, but it does show one thing with the neptune clay model that went unused in the release renders: The green paint is glow in the dark!