Moonlight in style
This is my 35th project in my year-long effort to learn 3D art. It is a really great journey, but I have been feeling a need to get advice and/or coaching.
So I have been reaching out to several professional designers at Adobe or other places to get feedback on my work. I am grateful for the advice I got. The main things I got from the feedback was:
1 – Start with an idea, not a technique.
While I had somewhat come to that conclusion (I talked about it in earlier posts), this encouraged me again to not just try and replicate a nice visual effect I learn about in a tutorial, but rather start from the idea I am trying to picture and then figure out the techniques I'll need to create that idea.
2 – Pay more attention to the finished product
The suggestion I got was to pay more attention to the finished product, to its graphical nature. The advice came with references to mutliple artists and designers who do that really well.
With these advice in mind, I started this week's project from a simple idea: simple spheres bubbling up to the sky, emerging from grass-like stems. This is a very simple drawing I had sketched out.
Then, I thought about how I would render this graphically. Since I really like Japanese art, I looked at various works and got most inspired by the art of Ohara Koson, a japanese artists. In particular, I really liked his moonlight pieces.
While I was not going for an exact replica of the style, I selected a color palette and texturing to try and produce a similar mood to my composition.
Below are a screenshot showing how the scene was set up in Cinema 4D. Here are the techniques I used:
- X-Particles to generate the small spheres. I used two emitters, one for the steps and the spheres at their tip, and one for the flying spheres.
- Sketch and toon rendering to generate stroked outlines. I did not use Sketch and Toon for the shading though.
- Final compositing in Photoshop to get the textures I wanted. I blended a number of noise textures on the overally piece, including a dark wood pattern from Claudio Gulieri available on the Creative Cloud market assets and two paper textures from subtlepatterns.com (paper and ricepaper #3).
- For the moon surface, I used a texutre of the moon surface found on planetpixelemporium.com combined with a texture generated from After Effects, following this tutorial.
