Painted Magic

I'm very excited to share a bit of the process of creating my final project for my foundation term in Think Tank Online. I started my journey in 3D only at the beginning of the term so this was definitely a huge undertaking for me, but I’m really proud of the result! I chose to recreate the beautiful concept from the story Arcanum by Romance Club, and decided I wanted to put my own magical spin on it. In one of my other professions, I’m also an author and I’m currently writing a book about magical art ,and as I also have a background in oil painting, this quickly turned into a passion project.

I actually started this project with a smaller version of the original concept (it included only the main easel and didn’t have the right side of the image) as I found the full one only a bit later on. But as soon as I saw the full concept I knew I wanted to take on that challenge. There were definitely points in the process when I sort of regretted that decision as I was struggling to keep up with my schedule even with the added 2 weeks of the holiday break, but I’m very glad that I stuck with it.

The modeling part of the project went pretty smoothly. I created a block-out of the full scene, and moved on to detailed modeling and polishing each object one after the other. I also made sure that my scene was scaled correctly by using a base mesh. At this stage, I didn’t pay too much attention to the lighting, but I did want to already have blue shadows that would indicate night-time. I used a dark blue dome light to help with that.

-Block-out and scale

By the end of the polishing stage, I had all of the large objects fully done and only left some of the smaller items for later on.

-Polishing stage

Moving to sculpting and creating the fabrics was a real challenge. I decided to take on working in 2 programs I had not touched before- Zbrush and marvelous designer, as I believed it would allow me to achieve better results. I am very very grateful to have received help and instructions at this stage from my boyfriend who is a Think Tank alumni; he showed me the ropes of how to go about using the programs and without him, I’d have probably lost many more nights of sleep figuring them out.

I chose to not retopologize my sculpted meshes and used displacements and Vray proxies for the final render, but in hindsight, retopologising would have probably been the better choice.

-Sculpting

I’ve created all of my UV’s over the course of 4 days of concentrated work. And it was a bit of a nightmare as I started not really sure where to cut many of my objects. Maya also gave me many issues at this stage as the unfold option gave me extremely strange results that made no sense. I eventually figured out that if I switch a bunch of times between the options of Unfold 3D and Legacy, most of the issues fix themselves, but that was only toward day 3 of the process.

-UVs

Texturing was a very large undertaking as there were so many objects in the scene, but I think this was my favorite part of the project. I started with the large items first and moved on gradually to the smaller items. Originally I gave all my textures 4K maps but I quickly learned that my scene just became waaay too heavy so I had to reduce my farther objects to 2k. My approach toward texturing was trying to create realistic textures and put as much attention as I could to the small details to push them over the edge. I tried to use as many real textures as I possibly could to achieve that look, as I knew that painting wouldn’t give me the best results when thinking of realism. In this stage, I found that my background in oil painting was actually very helpful in noticing the details and balancing my textures.

-Textures

I finished all my textures just in time for the last week, which I dedicated to fixing the lighting and doing extra texture fixes accordingly. The lighting was a bit of a back-and-forth process as I wanted to have a clear nighttime feeling and also wanted to have the magical painting as the main focus point of the image. Balancing between the different parts of the room, the bluish light of the moon and warm firelight, and darkening the background while still keeping it visible was a bit tricky, but I’m pretty pleased with the result. I also spent time figuring out what I wanted to put outside the window, as in the original concept there is nothing there but light. The idea of the witch flying over the moon was a last moment addition that I quickly fell in love with.I created godrays by rendering them in a separate file with only black textures so that I had a black-and-white mask to play with in Photoshop while compositing.

The compositing took me about a day of me pretty much going back and forth on the smallest of details until eventually I couldn’t really tell anything apart anymore, by which stage I knew the project was done and that I had my final render.

This has been a very emotional process, that included many sleepless nights but I’m really proud of the work I did and I very much look forward to keep working on my skills and creating more art!