Maquette

Software Used: Maya, Blender, Zbrush, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Marmoset Toolbag 5

Concept

Modeled and surfaced from a collection of photographic references

This piece is an homage to my maternal ancestors. Combining my memories, both real and contrived about their persons and of the spaces they inhabited, I wanted to build a scene that represents my precious remembrances of them.

The ornate outer box is meant to act as a protective container and shrine for these memories. It is based off of the architecture of gothic cathedrals, carved gothic-style cuckoo clocks, and ornate molded and carved chests.

I've had this image in one form or another in mind for years, and I've attempted it once before when I was a student. This is another attempt and I really treated this more as a sketch to get down an updated image of this scene as I imagine it at present. I'm sure I'll revisit this again in the future.

Base Colour

Normals

Roughness

PureRef reference board

modeling

For this project I worked from multiple blocking rounds, starting with basic cubes to get the furniture layout. Once I had those pieces fleshed out I started adding more blocking elements to help fill up the room. Then I turned to the outer box, and finally to the various props that fill up the room. This was a very additive process for me, and I worked between rounds of blocking/detailing doing rough sketches of what else I might like to add.

The room was modeled primarily in Maya, but I did make use of Zbrush for meshes like the sofa, the crucifix, and the statue of San Francesco. I also made a lot of use of Blender for its wonderful curves and cloth sims.

For the most part I modeled all the pieces to real-world proportions and kept them straight and square until I had all details in place. Then I made use of lattices to wonk and skew the pieces. This piece is rooted in reality, but its totally imaginary and I wanted the style of the modeling to reflect that.

Model example pre and post wonk pass

texturing

Similar to the modeling, I wanted the texture style to be rooted in reality while maintaining just enough wonk and stylization to give the scene a sense of make-believe. I tried to do this by increasing the scale of patterns like the woodgrain, and by exaggerating details like edge-wear and scratching.

Textures were made in Substance Painter with assistance from Photoshop for alpha creation.