For our three-week development project I decided to choose the product design brief, as a way to develop something outside of my usual focus, which is human characters. I want to focus on realistic rendering for this project, using it to further my knowledge of materials and refine my design process.
My brief is to design five items that might appear in a medieval fantasy shop, in a Dungeons and Dragons-type setting. I think one design a week wouldn't push me hard enough, while two might be too much, so I went with five as a compromise.
Ring
The first item I chose is a magical ring. I wasn't sure at first what enchantment to choose, so I started scribbling silhouettes in search of a starting point.
As I went on I found I liked the idea of a ring which used the face of an animal as if it was biting the user's finger. The only problem with this is the fact that the teeth would pierce the skin, which I decided to incorporate into the item, making it a blood magic ring powered by the life of the user. Going on with the silhouettes I found them becoming more and more like a dragon skull, as I liked the sleek and sharp shapes of snake and lizard skulls but also enjoyed the more antelope-like horns.
The next stage for this was to render it fully to show the materials involved, but I struggled with visualising the ring as a 3D shape. Instead, I opted to sculpt the shape in Zbrush to allow me to create an actual 3D shape which I could then work from later for a paintover.
Taking a rough shape from maya, I found it much easier using this method to create a pleasing shape for the ring. Having a 3D model let me see in real time how the changes I was making affected not just the profile silhouette, but how it looked from all angles, allowing me to make the shape interesting from all angles, not just the side. Below are some process shots.
And then the final 3D model.
After this was done I took the above screenshot and used it as a base for a paintover, but first I considered the type of material I would be painting. I felt iron would be a fitting material for a blood-based item, but a worn and tarnished rather than a polished iron, to give it an aged look and give it history. Below are some material studies where I tried to figure out how iron reflects light, what kind of colours it contains, and which combination of brushes gave the most realistic look. In the end, I settled on a pipeline of establishing colours with a basic hard round brush, blending them to a smooth gradient using a soft airbrush, and then adding texture by blending over the top using noisier, more textured brushes.
I'm very pleased with how the final painting turned out, I think there's a believable feel to it even despite the magic effects and the nature of the design. In places there might be a little too much texture, but as a concept piece rather than a final illustration, and in conjunction with the zbrush sculpts I think the design holds up really well. I am however concerned about the amount of time it took me to produce one item, and I think I need to streamline the process if I'm to finish five in the time I have.
