Maya, Adobe Substance Painter, Blender, Adobe Premiere Pro
Reflection in the Depths
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Over the summer, while I was taking a digital marketing summer class, I was overcome with the urge to create (as I often am).
I asked my friend for a prompt, and he gave me the following: “Do something with a magic crystal.”
And so I did.
Next was the crystal itself, which is actually quite simple. I used low-division icospheres as my base, and scaled them to the size I wanted.
I used this material by Isabel Lammens as a base, and added dust, dirt, scratches, and that white outline visible on the final product.
I knew that most of the length of the crystal wouldn’t be seen, and so I didn’t spend as much time on the back, underside, or very top of the crystals.
The first thing I did was create the cave walls that would enclose the shot, which I modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Painter.
In addition to this, I made a very rudimentary canoe and lantern that would sit on the short of the cave. Without these props, I think the shot would have felt very empty.
I brought everything into Blender, where I finished up the final 30% of the project.
First, I animated the water: a noise texture plugged into a displacement texture, keyframed to change seed by frame. It’s not the cleanest way to do it, but since the camera is so close to the water, and the main point of the water is its reflection, this worked perfectly.
Next, I animated the energy lights ‘moving through’ the crystal. In actuality, I duplicated the crystals, scaled them just a tad, lowered the opacity, and moved lights around it.
The vignette and depth of field effects I did in Post Processing really helps this piece pop, and instills a feeling of grandiose in the viewer.