Art Spotlight: Hyper Space Pizza

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

Hi! My name is Pier-Olivier Desbiens and I’m a 3D Artist currently based in Montréal. My story is one of a kid who loved games, cartoons, and drawing badly. That love made me enroll into a general 3D program out of high school where I spent 3 years learning the basics of drawing okay and doing polygon things.

I moved to the fantastic city of Montréal shortly after that and began working at Hibernum Creations where I am currently working as main artist on a PC game project with a small team of great people. The game is called Dread Nautical and is about a stranded cruise ship swarmed by otherworldly monstrosities. It should be pretty neat!

But that’s enough about the plug.

Serious talk.

Screaming pizzas in space.

We have this weekly art challenge at work where someone suggests a theme and everybody can do a piece of art related to it. That week’s theme was ‘Space Pizza’. After very substantial and serious thought, I decided it would be interesting to explore the existential terror of a sentient piece of pizza flying through space at the speed of light.

I started working on the model directly in 3DS Max, designing the pizza’s stupid mug on a whim until it made me laugh. Being a quick weekly sketch thing that was going to be rendered in flat colors, absolutely no attention was given to proper topology. It hurts to see it. Maybe that’s why the pizza is screaming after all.

The texturing process was pretty straightforward, I used every shortcut I could to make it as fast as possible. I decided on the color palette early on and created a material for each one, to cut the unwrap and texturing out of the process, a method I started using when working under a tight deadline for a project with very stylized art.

I animated the pizza by placing skinning to a regular Dummy and keyframing it at a random place every frame, to make it looks like it’s shaked senselessly by the sheer speed of its journey through the cosmos.

For the stars zooming by, I went the first cheat that came to my mind. First, I used a sphere with inversed normals to create a circle of space surrounding the pizza. (Inverted normals is a neat quick trick to add outlines and vignettes in Sketchfab, in my experience.)

For the stars, I created a couple big big cylinders that intersects with the sphere. I then removed a bunch of faces from the side of the cylinder to create smalls strips of polygons.

Following that, it was just a matter of rotating the cylinder to create the illusion of stretched out stars flying by!

Sketchfab allowed me to import the whole animation quickly. From then, I made the scene background white to hide the ‘stars-cylinder’ from everywhere but the circle of space. Sprinkle in some bloom and chromatic aberration for the sci-fi points and voilà!

You can check out my portfolio and follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr!

Thank you!