3D Metropolis Digital Art, Writing, and more by Scott Drake

Labyrinthine.wmv (600×400, 1.5MB, WMV9 video)

Now:

It feels like it’s been too long since I’ve been able to work on a 3d piece. One of the last chances I had I was able to produce this, which suffers somewhat from a shortened time allotment but did give me a chance to work on moody lighting.

As the animatic demonstrates, this piece doesn’t really come alive until the lights show up. I think I have plenty of room to grow in my lighting capabilities, but even a little creative lighting can add interest to an otherwise simple scene.

Then:

Labyrinthine is the result of a brief mind’s-eye image I had showing these spiralling stair-stepping sort of forms with shiny chrome reflections. The reflections created at this stage were graceful but I knew the image would continue to evolve as I worked on it.

The next changes took away some of the slickness and blurred the reflections but things were still in the early stages of development and I was feeling out the ideas at work, transforming the products of my imagination into something less fleeting.

The torus knot, which had been a stand-in until now, got replaced by a pair of curving forms to act as the new visual focus of the piece.

Experimentation with the curving forms’ surface ensued. This particular experimental failure shows the infamous “poop vent” version, thusly dubbed by Nick Yu. I was working on a texture that, in 2D, looked somewhat fire-like; yet placing it on the geometry and combined with the lighting it looked like something else completely.

Another experiment with textures and materials. This reminds me of some of the food they eat in the BBC video version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I ended up going back to an early version of the material, then adding some menace by drastically changing the lighting. Projecting the grid immediately helped make things dark and foreboding, almost too much in fact.

A few additional lights with varying size grid projections filled in many of the dark areas and helped create a lot of detail which did not exist before.

That detail proved to be overwhelming. Some further adjustments to the orientation, brightness, and projection size of the lights helped soften the impact. Then depth of field came into play to provide a better sense of a start and end to the detail instead of one overwhelming mess.

Finally, a little glow on the bright parts of the image added the finishing touch and sells the notion that the image starts in a brighter locale and travels down into darkness.

Check out the full-size final version of Labyrinthine.