Art Spotlight: Fallout Diorama

In Art Spotlight, we invite Sketchfab artists to talk about one of their designs.

Hi, I’m Sofia “Fi” Silva, and I’m an artist from Portugal. I used to do 2D art, but in 2015 I started doing 3D art. The transition from 2D to 3D was easy for me, and knowing the basics from 2D, like lighting and composition really helped. I fell in love with 3D art when I tried it so I practiced every day and already made a lot of work and improvement. I always use Blender for my work. I work as a freelance 3D artist for games, but my passion is 3D illustration. I’m also still studying in university.

I started doing 3D art after seeing some art and games in low poly style. Some inspirations were the artists Turnislefthome, MKeverydays and Mezaka, among others, and the games Monument Valley and Lara Croft: GO.

Low poly style is a style characterized by low number of polygons, flat shading, and each face having a single color. It usually uses a lot of triangulation and displacement, and beautiful lighting.

When I started, I knew I wanted to do low poly dioramas of games and movies I like, and I started with Fallout, because I was playing Fallout 3 at the time. I wanted to add iconic things from Fallout, like a Fatman and mini nukes, supermutants, the dog, Dogmeat, Nuka Cola, a broken car, all in a small scene that could tell a story.

I started by doing a humanoid base to use for all the humanoid characters. It was inspired by Lara Croft: GO. The base is rigged (I did my own rig based on the armature from Rigify) and can be posed.

I used this base for human characters. I just colored the faces and did extrusions. (I didn’t use the guy for the final scene.)

As well as super mutants!

I aimed to make the props as simple as possible while still being recognizable. You can see the flat shading, the low poly count, and the colored faces. I did not use any textures. You can see the wireframe on the bottle.

The dog was also modeled standing and rigged, and then posed.

When I assembled the scene, I wanted everything to have a wasteland vibe, so I used low saturation colors and brown tones. The exception is the Nuka Cola Quantum, I wanted it to stand out.

A lot of people asked me to upload my models on Sketchfab, so I did it. It’s a lot better to show the models in 3D since a lot of details are not shown with a single 2D render.

I also learn a lot from viewing other people’s models from every angle and studying the topology with the wireframe on.

And this is the scene on Sketchfab!

http://sketchfab.com/models/49b3b008222a4f3a88b83e2869e66426

Thanks Sofia!

You can find more of Sofia’s work here on Sketchfab, Twitter and Tumblr.