atomic monster

Shopping in the zombie apocalypse, this is a concept piece I did about a year ago now.  Like many people out there I also enjoy the idea of a good old fashioned zombie apocalyptic world.  It would be utterly horrifying to be faced with the idea of being eaten alive by a pack of rotting blood thirsty living dead.  But, who wouldn't want to explore the world after people?  With all the places to explore it would feel like being on a different planet.  For me it goes into that child hood fantasy of wanting to spend the night in the mall with all of the stores open and you, just for one night can do whatever you wanted too!  That would be AWESOME!  Maybe that is one of the reason I love working on environments so much.  It becomes very easy to get lost in the idea and emotions of what you are trying to have the viewer feel.

I saw a really awesome render of some rocks the other day and was inspired to see if I could recreate a version of my own of some rocky terrain so I made this little scene.  The scene was modled, rendered and composited in Blender 3D .  It is a very simple scene and made just for fun in a couple of hours.  The rocks are all subsurface cube objects that I run a noise displacement map on using the world coordinates.  This allowed me to just make instances of the cube and drag them around the scene to get different rock shapes.  Some of the rocks needed to be scaled to get some more size variation but that is pretty much the only thing that is different about them other then their positions.  It was actually really fun to just move the cube around the scene and watch these random rock shapes form.  After the layout was done I added in some particle grass to break the ground up.  Not enough time was spent on the grass so it looks pretty bad ...

Here is another painting I did based on an idea I had of a little bunny that found his way to the dark edge of the woods.  This one was really fun to work on from start to finish.  I started with a black and white block out of the main shapes really only thinking about composition.  Next I drew over that on a new layer with a brush that looked like pencil work, this helped me detail out the shapes more.  After that I went over the entire image with an airbrush, still only working in black and white to soften some of the ares and blend the values a bit more.  Once that was done I made a new layer and went over the image with the airbrush again this time adding big patches of color.  Once I was happy with that I made yet another new layer and got a nice hard edged brush and started to work the shapes more.  I went back and forth this way until I ended up with the image above.

Another image based on the Tokyo flood tunnels.  Needs a bit more work and a some fixes but its almost there.  I'm really enjoying making these little scenes and would like to keep it up.  It would be great to get a new one done every week as its a really good practice to keeping the scenes small not getting caught up in the tiny details but focusing on the larger picture.  A good example of that is the stairs, since I give my self 2-4 hours for these scenes (not counting render time) I kept the stairs very basic with just cubes pushed and pulled to the right shapes with little to no detail.  Normally I would spend too much time getting caught up in modeling everything out as best I could...and then get bored and never work on the image again.  Keeping my self on a tight hourly schedule for these scenes I am able to judge what I should be modeling and what I can just use a box or other primitive object for and moving on.

When I was digging up reference images for the Tunnel scene I found a bunch of pictures from the Tokyo flood tunnels and that place is just too damn awesome so I had to model a quick something from it.  While I was modeling this one I kept thinking about a level in Mirrors Edge that seemed just like it so I went back to the game after I got to this point and sure enough there is a version of the Tokyo flood tunnels in the game too.  That section from Mirrors Edge is awesome and it gave me some really great ideas of things I can add.

Inspired by an Andrew Price tutorial where he creates a tunnel scene.  Figured I would take a stab at making my own version after watching the video.  It is really empty and lacks good detail but over all I was happy enough with how it came out given I didn't spend too much time with it.  Rendered using the internal render engine in Blender 3D.  The thing that really made this work came from the compositor inside of Blender.