The mission of this project is to create a fantasy beast. Something totally unconventional yet in perfect balance with its natural setting. It is my intention to create items that, upon first view, seem completely normal, but, upon closer inspection, reveal a surprising depth of character.
Going back to the period of the Covid Pandemic, I did a lot of alone outdoor exploring, and it was during one of these trips that the seed for this undertaking was sown. I'd like to make something symbolic of the calm and contentment I experienced when out in nature as a reminder of those wonderful times.
For the model character, the sculpt of the snail went well. The retopology was a bit tricky but I made the face and head area of the nail manually and generated a quad retopology for the rest of the body then merged them together. Ran into some problems with baking. Other than that the painting went well, relied less on the smart material and incorporated some stencil textures.
For the main ‘sunlight’, I used a spotlight with an intensity of 250 and volumetric visible light. I also add some noise with soft turbulence. This help gives a misty, humid kind of atmosphere to the scene. I also add some falloff to make it seem more natural as we previously discussed.
As for the other object in the scene, the tall grass was pretty challenging because I didn’t really know how to approach it. I start out with a capsule object, delete ⅔ of the bottom half of the capsule. Then I used the matrix extrude to create those individual grass blades.
The cattails were also very complicated, I didn’t come out as how it should be. The stem was created using the cylinder polygon and the flowerhead was made using the capsule polygon. Then I use the clone tool to make several cattails.