FishNeedsFire

ORIGINS

The idea for this project came a bit by chance to tell the truth, and really only came from a simple sketch in my notebook. I'm generally inspired by body horror, mechanical figures, and a slightly offbeat universe where what is shown can be visually disturbing, strange, but sometimes poetic.

EVERYTHING STARTED WITH SCULPT

This whole project started with a very spontaneous sculpting phase on Zbrush.

I already had my idea in mind and just after I did this sketch I thought I'd try to do a face on zbrush. I didn't really do a preparatory sketch of what I wanted to do, I just took some reference pictures of the anatomy of the human face, even though I already knew that my goal was to play with it, rather than to be perfectly realistic.

So here are the steps of my sculpt, represented by the different levels of subdivisions.

RENDER I - CloseUp

This first render, with this lighting, wasn't premeditated. I was doing an other lighting and during a render, by going through the differents AOV's I displayed only the Rim Light and to me I just thought that just with one rim light at the right position, it already brought so much strenght and storytelling to this creature.

So I decided to keep it at the main element of the lighting, rebalance the intensity of the various lights in my scene and move this rimlight slightly to the side, so that it could show more of the creature's face.

RENDER II - SideView

I had two main ideas when making this rendering:

the first (more practical) was simply to show the creature as a whole. Of course the face being small compared to its size, it was obvious for me to do close-ups on it, but I also worked a lot with the materials on the rest of the body, especially the painted metal.

This rendering also allows me to show more of my creative intention, to make a creature lost in a huge and dark void. We could imagine being a submarine that has just discovered this creature, lighting it up in the middle of the darkness to better observe it.

RENDER III - InTheAbyss

This render is the one I least expected and in the end it's probably the one I prefer even though the creature is very much in the distance. I had the idea from the beginning, with this cigarrette, to make a chiaroscuro.

I think contrast adds a lot of strength to the subject in a picture, whether it's a painting or a photograph, and it's something I really like about pictures in general. this image for me is already much more mysterious.

It is true that the creature is much more in the background in this image, but more than a rendering showing the details of my work, I wanted to create a singular image, with a composition that would highlight my character not only because its size would be predominant.

I wanted to transport the viewer for a moment into a dark, mysterious, strangely calm, but poetic world.

COMPOSITING - BringCreatureToLife

compositing has really allowed me to develop my intentions and give a whole new atmosphere to my renders. I already knew that I wanted to give a bit of a steamy feel to it by using fog or by creating fine particles that I had seen during my research on photos of the abyss. It also allowed me to ask myself in the end what color filter could accentuate the emotions emitted by my images. Moreover, apart from the degradations which are common on an image like noise, or chromatic abberation, I wanted to try to create an "old screen" effect.

Among all my photographic inspirations, many are made with low quality cameras, however I find that it can really add a charm to an image and that's why I added this effect in compositing. It takes the form of very thin horizontal lines that are particularly noticeable in the brightest areas of the image.

To finish I also wanted to show you my main references to achieve or imagine this project.

The details I wanted to do in sculpt, the original creature that made me imagine that Robot, Glitch images, Lighting and Skin texturing references.

I hope that you liked my project, more will come soon.