Behind the Scenes: Melting Home

In the Behind the Scenes series, I'm inviting artists to talk about the creation of one of their works. Today, Nita Ravalji talks about 'Melting Home'.

Hi everyone, I am Nita Ravalji (nitz) and I will be showing you the breakdown or making of the "Melting Home" artwork.

Inspiration

I always find low poly art works so interesting and beautiful - I wanted to make one. The global warming topic has been on my mind for a very long time and I wanted to make it in different style. So I combined camera projection mapping and low-poly style.. which worked fine. I choose a photograph from flickr, you can find CC0 photographs from there which can be modified.

Modeling

Pic 1 - Base Mesh

All I needed to model was a bear.(just a basic shape).

• I used a skin modifier to create a base mesh.(pic.1)
• Once the base mesh is ready and nearly looks like the bear, I applied a skin modifier.(pic.2)

Pic 2 - skin modifier applied

• Then gave Multires from modifier's list and sculpted the basic details, like nose, mouth, eyes, claws, shoulder bumps, ears.(pic.3)
• Then gave decimate and adjusted the low poly level..(pic.4)
• For posing I used simple armature set up..

Pic 3 - Multires

Pic 4 - Decimation

Materials

It's a default diffuse color. just made nose and eyes little darker.

Background

Pic 5 - scene setup

The photograph I used is by Marko Kivelä from flickr.

• This is the scene set up. (pic.5)
• I separated the base and the background ,then opened UVs of base from camera angle by using project from view in Unwrap.
• also gave it little bit reflective surface.

Lighting

I used 3 point lighting for this.

• Used same image in the environment texture(intensity :1). You can also use HDRi .
• So the source light here is from bear's left side, which is a very strong sun light. It is also important to choose the same color as your background light color. I used a sun light with 5 intensity.
• I used a blue fill light from the bear's right side, to get a fake blue bounce from the snow surface.(sun intensity : 0.2)
• There is little bit light from back. I used simple planer as an emitter for back light.(intensity : 8 , color same as source light)
• Did little color correction in GIMP.

That's it :) it was a very simple and fun project to do. It always looks good when you Blend 2 mediums like real world and virtual world. so keep blending.

Thanks Nita!