Friday 26/3/21 - Identity Response Part 2

After making a small experiment as practice with direct inspiration from the moodboard I felt ready to get started. Now I was onto creating the first remake of my playlist art, for this I wanted to keep the aspect of someone falling through water as if they were floating in space. I decided to use a tutorial online to help me create a good looking underwater effect for the artwork, this was my biggest focus as it was the most difficult.

However this was very short and didn't give me enough information to make it look the best I could, in the end I only used it to make a test before making the actual work. This was the outcome.

Thankfully the creator of the intial tutorial made another longer and more detailed one to follow. My goal was to just make the water and then implement the astronaut and other aspects inspired by the moodsheet.

I followed this tutorial nearly exactly and overall it really helped to give me a good understanding at how some of the different components of Blender work including using keyframes and changing the materials and how they work. After creating this I found a free model online of a very futuristic looking character to place in my shot. I ran into troubles as I was unable to pose the character and could only really move and rotate them. I decided to place them in a way that made them appear to be unconsious and motionless underwater.

These were the outcomes:

For the final rendition of the album art I simply recreated the text from the original as I felt that worked well enough. My one issue was with the character featured in the work, I feel like having them falling down in the center would work better. However, this work was very time consuming so for the experiment I decided to move on to the other album art and revisit it if I had time.

The next one would be similar to the first experiment as it didn't require as many complex features such as the water. I started by looking online for a human skeleton model, time constraints meant that I had to rely on royalty free models. I found a good skull model on the site found here. It was of a melting skull instead of a full skeleton, something I really liked as it was creative and stood out.

I initially gave it a metallic material so it would reflect the lights I'd be using in the work.

I shortly after made a glowing pink background similar to what I did in the Starboy inspired experiment combined with the original playlist art. However, the metallic skull looked very out of place with it so instead I wanted to make the skull have some glowing aspects itself. I watched a short tutorial on how to make a stylized emission shader which essentially gave the outlines of objects a glow of any colour you wanted.

This was the outcome, I changed some aspects slightly to better fit my work such as giving the skull a blue base colour instead of just black.

Next I decided to implement glowing eyes, this was done by simply adding two spheres inside the eye socket and changing their material to an emission (which essentially means they glow and give off light). I used a yellow glow as it wasn't too bright.

This was the outcome, not exactly what I expected. The glow was there but essentially was only around the 'eyes' themselves instead of glowing around the socket. I looked online for a tutorial and discovered that I needed to turn on effects such as bloom and screen space reflections. Bloom essentially makes lights more realistic and brighter so that they glow, allows the light source to hit other objects. Screen space reflections essentially calculates reflections, often used for things such as puddles in games.

This was the new outcome after following the tutorial.

I felt that my work was missing something, the skull felt weird just floating on the pink background. Since this work was very neon and retrowave inspired I wanted to take more aspects of that. I decided to make a neon grid on the ground, very similar to the image. I also liked this as it was a design used in the Tron films.

To make this I had to make a flat surface (called a plane in Blender) and subdivide it multiple times into even squares. After I then had to make the object a wireframe so that I could essentially make the glowing grid. The wireframe meant I would be seeing the outlines of the squares. This unfortunately also meant I couldn't keep the faces of the squares so I'd need to add another flat surface underneath. I changed the shader of the wireframe to an emission much like with the glowing eyes, I decided on a blue glow to contrast against the pink background and match the skull.

When finishing this I realised my work was too bright, mostly due to the pink background alongside the grid. So instead I decided to make two versions. One had the pink background and the other wouldn't have a solid background. For the pink background I made it so the actual background would no longer give off light and instead placed a smaller square in-front of it with a blue glow to it. I also changed the grid to be a pink glow. This way I'd still get a pink light without making my project too bright. The other outcome had the same except I removed the pink completely, this gave the background a nice smooth gradiant due to the colours from the grid and the square. I prefered this version despite the pink background being more like the original.

Whilst they were still very bright I was happy with this outcome, I could use photoshop to fix this. Next came adding the text and other changes to make it look more like an album cover. I wanted to give it a very glitch inspired design and started on the skull. I loved the melting aspect and wanted to play into it, I used online presets to make it seem like the face of the skull was glitching in a way that seemed like it was melting even more. For this I used an app called Glitche and then overlayed the outcome on the original render through photoshop.

Next up was the text, I liked the whole repeating Error aspect but struggled on figuring out where to actually place it and what to do with it. I experimented with a couple different formats until I got a some help from a friend's suggestion. Their idea was to put the text on the background in multiple repeating lines. I'd then remove parts of these lines and shift them alongside adding areas with different colours and sizes.

For the main text I overlayed the same text with different colours to mimic it slightly glitching out. After this I added some film grain to the overall image. This was the final outcome.