The Cage

"The Cage," based on concept art by the talented WLOP. Created for my Foundation Term Final Project at Think Tank Training Centre.

I loved the moodiness that the original 2D concept captured. It was the perfect blend of gothic style — despair and nuances of romance mixed together. In my 3D rendition, I attempt to heighten those elements using textures, atmospheric dust and lighting, and color enrichment.

With only 4 weeks to complete the project, I started by creating a schedule. Not a day-to-day schedule or anything too fancy, but just something to structure my tasks that I could easily refer to throughout the week like a benchmark.

The first week, I dedicated to gathering references and blocking out the scene.

However, this proved to be the particularly difficult for a few reasons. Mainly because the concept has a very peculiar perspective distortion. Objects in the background appear more elongated and slanted than those closer to the foreground. To achieve this look in 3D space, I set the camera focal length to 25mm and "cheated the angle" on the character and some of the foreground elements to keep them from looking warped in the render.

Below is the original concept by WLOP (left) and my viewport scene with cheated perspective (right).

The following week, I refined the sculpt meshes in ZBrush, put together some procedural textures within Maya, created the dress in Marvelous Designer, and unwrapped the UVs.

I created three basic poses for the crows, duplicated and tweaked them as needed, then matched them to the concept as best I could.

Additionally, I began to experiment with some volumetric environment fog, MASH scattering for the dust particles, and smoke fluid simulations, to get a better feel for the atmosphere and how other objects interact with it in the scene.

The third week, I worked on XGen for the hair and feathers creation, as well as the hand-painted texturing in Mari for the female character and the canvas.

I followed Hadi Karimi's YouTube tutorial on realistic XGen hair for my female character. The braids and bun were created by converting the edges of a twisted double-helix and torus, respectively, into XGen guide curves.

I designed two types of feathers for the birds and devised alphas and normal maps for both. I then applied the maps onto hair cards to reduce the overall polycount.

The final week I finished the procedural textures for the tables and walls, and some painted textures for the paintbrushes and stained glass windows. The last three days were set aside for small refinements, compositing, and paint-overs inside Photoshop.

Mahalo to my supervisor, GunSik Kim at Think Tank Training Online, for his guidance and encouragement. Mahalo to my instructors, Adar Bronstein, Arianna Mao, Chad Fox, Joe Crawford, Matthew Novak, Renato Eiras, for allowing me to reach new heights in my artistic journey.