Hey guys!
Please check the higher res image here
I really love point'n click adventure games from Lucas Arts and I always wanted to do a tribute to my favorite: The Curse of Monkey Island. So I decided to make a fan art of Blondebeard's Chicken Shoppe. In this game there's a lot of stunning environments but I feel something more when I remember of Blondebeard's Chicken Shoppe, and is also where Manny Calavera appears for the first time. They made this to promote the launch of Grim Fandango. I wanted to put something of the old game in my art, so I used the original painting of "El Pollo Diablo" on the golden frame, drew by Larry Ahern and painted by Chris Hockabout. The original 2D art was made by Bill Tiller.
Also I'd like to thanks a lot the guys from Fox Render Farm (www.foxrenderfarm.com), they supported me, this way I was able to render at really higher resolution than I was in my home pc.
I broke the render in some parts to have more control in post and slow down the render time: foreground, the main table, house structure, general assets and background. Also made layers of Fur and Fog.
Lighting is totally important on every scenes. Doesn't matter how great are your model or textures, if the lighting isn't good it will destroy everything on the scene. Also lighting sets the entire mood and feel of the piece. As the original piece was really cozy and warm I wanted to keep the same feeling, but with more mood and contrast. I created a warm Hdri and some warm rect lights to paint the light through some key spots.
Here's a little bit of the process of sculpting in Zbrush. I made some quick sketches to show how I sculpted some of the elements!
For Manny Calavera and the chicken I created a sphere, converted to dynamesh and sculpted in traditional way.
For the golden frame, I created a cube, converted to dynamesh, turned on the symmetry on X and Y and used ClayBuildup to build the main shapes of the ornaments, then used Dam_Standard brush to define better the shapes. I repeated this process a lot of times while raising the resolution of dynamesh until came to the final result. I used this same technique to make the wooden menu with a skull.
For all of wooden elements of the scene I used the same technique shown below. I used Slash brush to define the veins and brake the silhouette then used the ClayBuildup to define some volume, later used Flatten to control the shape and Dam_Standard for the fine details. As I wanted to do some variations of wood on the elements, the amount of clay buildup\flatten depends of how rough is the element. For example, the barrel behind Manny is really rudimentary, so I used just a little of Flatten. The columns, beams, windows and furniture were made almost without ClayBuildup. The stones were made in a very similar way.
For fine details and ornaments, like the chair and candlestick I used a really small size of Claybuildup and later refined it with smooth and Dam_Standard.
