Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl 

Considered the god of wind, earth, light and life, the bridge between the lands and the skies. 

This was my final foundations project for think tank training Centre wanted to mix all the skills learned during the foundation term in order to bring this amazing concept to life.

I wanted to have a lot of things happening at the same time, to create something coming from my own culture, to have pyramids, to have the Aztek god "Quetzalcoatl" represented as a magestic, beautiful and powerful being. Selecting a concept that encapsulated all of this was hard, but as soon as I saw the concept art from titan of terra, I knew I needed to create his vision in 3D, just by looking at his art I knew he was super passionated about this topic. 

Modeling & Sculpting

The first getting the overall shape in Maya and brought into zbrush for a rough sculpting phase. Once I was happy with the overall base shape, details were added. Sculpting the rocks was one of the trickiest parts of the entire process, but because of the scale of the creature I figured I could get away with not adding a lot of detail into it, and still have it look like a rock made creature. 

Before going into more sculpting details, a highpoly mesh was exported for Retopology and UV Unwrapping. With a lowpoly mesh ready, projection of details and cleanup was done in zbrush, a second highpoly mesh was exported for texturing in Mari. 

Texturing

The texturing process was also a little tricky, besides using tiled texture for the diffuse, all the small "paint splatter" colors were entirely hand painted with the regular brush. I tried using custom brushes but the look I was getting was to "procedural" and not at all like the hand painted colors on the concept. 

LookDev

Once the Textures were done, I brought everything back into maya and started lightning the scene and creating my materials. 

I wasn't getting that rocky feeling on my textures and was thinking about going back to mari and re-texture, but before doing that I tried getting more shadows going in the creature to highlight the rocks a little more, and I also used a Vray Blend Mtl to breakup the textures even more. 

That ended up working out and saved me a lot of re-texturing time. 

Environment

For the environment, the whole pyramid was modeled using the ancient city of "Uxmal" as reference. 

For the Mountains, a single asset was sculpted and scatter in the scene using the same technique as the clouds. 

For the clouds I use a single free VDB Asset and randomized the transform to fill the skies. 

Animation & FX

There's an Aztek Tale, that once a year in the come of spring, in the sunset a shadow will be casted into "Chiꞌ Chꞌeꞌen Its Ja", this shadow is believed to be Quetzalcoatl descending from the skies to visit the land of the people. This phenomenon is real and it's one of the reasons that this pyramid is one of the seven wonders of the world. 

Following that tale I needed a cinematic that reflected that. I did a simple rigg into the serpent to give it this feeling of ascension to the skies. 

For the FX I brought the animation into houdini and use a pyro solver for the smoke simulation. I also created a few dust particles to give it even more feeling of rocks crumbling down, however the simulation was giving me this "magic/mystic" movement within the dust particles, I ended up switching the color from dust to blue, and the result was eye catching instantly for me. 

In the case of the clouds, instead of using a simulation, which would've taken up to much time to simulate and render, I ended up just rendering a still frame of the clouds separately, and then added a displacement noise in after effects to give it that movement feeling

Post

For the final look, I added the green background and placed a few stars on top of it, added a camera shake to give it this sense of gravity and how even in the skies the power coming out of the serpent is huge. A lens flare was added from the gemstone in the horns, and of course added a few blooms here and there to the particles and even to the serpent. 

This was definately the most exciting personal project I've ever done, and I'm super happy with the end result. 

Special thanks to Ben Kelly who provided feedback , tips&tricks  into creating this piece. Also thank you to all my collegues who also provided super helpful insights in every step of the way.