Art Spotlight: Fairytale Bank

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About

Hi! My name is Ivan Sorokin, I’m a 3D artist from Chelyabinsk, Russia and I’d like to share a bit of my creation process of Fairytale Bank.

Since I was young I’ve always been fascinated by creative people, and I’ve been trying myself in all kinds of art forms. 3D was always my biggest passion. I’ve been doing it for about 15 years now and I’m not stopping any time soon—there are always new things to learn.

Inspiration

My goal for this project was to get some practice since I don’t do hand-painted stuff all that much. Something with a nice simple shadeless style, single diffuse map, and directional lighting baked in would be just perfect. Should be low poly as well!

With this in mind I set out to find a concept art that fit my needs: something bright and fairytale and more of a diorama, rather than just a single object.

Concept by Gerrit Willemse. (source)

After a bit of searching I found a great piece of concept art made by Gerrit Willemse, exactly what I was looking for (with characters as well!).

Tools

Most of the work (Drafting, Low Poly, Texturing) was done in Blender, except for some minor tweaks in the external image editor.

Modeling

It took me around 8 hours to complete this stage and it would have been faster if I had had a chance to do it in one go instead of 2 hours a day.

Drafting: Probably the most important step in the whole process, using simple primitives and forms, its purpose is to define basic shape and proportions. I use it as a guide later when I’m doing low-poly modeling.

Skin modifier is a perfect tool for drafting organic models faster, and it is somewhat similar to ZBrush’s ZSpheres. It turns edges into geometry, the thickness of which is controlled by vertex weight.

Modeling itself is rather straightforward and I don’t really have too much to say about it. My goal was to keep it low-poly without sacrificing silhouette too much.

For dragon spikes I made 2 different spike objects, which were duplicated and snap-aligned to the surface of the dragon mesh.

To make sure there was no gap between the spikes and the dragon I used the “Shrinkwrap” modifier. I selected the uncapped bottom of the spikes by using “Select All By Trait” > ”Non Manifold”, assigned a selection to a new vertex group and selected it in the Shrinkwrap modifier.

I also inverted the selection and applied a subtle “Transform: Randomize” to the tip of the spikes, to add some variation.

UV & Texturing

UV and Texturing took me another 8–14 hours to complete.

UVs are fully unique because my goal was to have a directional light baked into the texture.

For my texture base I needed 3 components: color draft, baked direct lighting, ambient Occlusion.

Painting was done directly in Blender using “Texture Paint” mode.

To make it less painful, I separated geometry by UV islands, making it easier to select different parts of the model and ensuring that I didn’t accidentally paint somewhere else.

It’s a lot easier to blur or paint away any UV or intersecting geometry seams if you disable “Occlude”, “Backface culling”, and “Normal falloff”. Just make sure you have “Face Selection Masking” enabled or else you’ll have brush strokes projected all the way through the model, resulting in a really nasty mess.

It’s easy to add text using a stencil texture mask. You can create it in an external image editor or directly in Blender, by baking Text object into texture.

It’s easy to add text using a stencil texture mask. You can create it in an external image editor or directly in Blender, by baking Text object into texture.

After I finished with painting, it became clear that the roof looked really flat and boring. I needed to make some adjustments, which would be rather tricky at this point.

There is this really cool modifier called “Data Transfer” which allows me to project data from one piece of geometry to another. It UV maps the new geometry perfectly, and is a really powerful tool that has a lot of other interesting applications.

Sketchfab

  • Background: Blurry and darker than the model, to provide better contrast.
  • Shading type: Shadeless.
  • Material: Default material, single diffuse map.
  • Post processing: Sharpness filter, since my texture is quite blurry.

And that’s it, pretty simple setup.

In Conclusion

I draw a lot of inspiration from all the amazing things other artists create and I’d like to thank Sketchfab for giving people a way to share their 3D art and learn from each other. I hope this little article can be helpful to someone. Thank you for reading.

 

About the author

Ivan Sorokin

3D Artist



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