Here is my entry for this week’s LMAC challenge! I call it “Reconnaissance”
...and yes, I had to look up how to spell it 😂
I knew I wanted a thief character to be looking out over the city, planning his next mission, so I started there.
The character was pulled from a really cool website called www.mixamo.com where they have a ton of royalty free characters with animations. I just used a thief character with a hanging pose, and then tweaked the pose to better suit the environment.
Then, as I was looking at the scene, I noticed the character was in the crossing point of the “rule of thirds” in the bottom right corner, so I wanted to add something to the opposite corner, and the only thing that didn’t seem incredibly hard to pull off was a tall tower. So that led me down the path of towers and walls.
Here is what the scene looked like in Blender. There was definitely some forced perspective this week! From this angle, the character looks like a giant, or the tower and walls look like toys haha
This is the final render coming out of Blender that I imported into Photoshop. I didn’t have much to mask out this week. If you look closely you can see the walls overlapping the rocks, and the character’s hand are really the only things I had to mask out.
Some other Photoshopping things I did were just adding shadows around the characters hand and feet, on the grass around the walls, and on the city where the tower would have been casting a really big shadow. It’s subtitle, but you can definitely tell when I turn that layer off.
Looking back on it now I wish I would have rounded out the bottom of the tower where it meets the ground a little more. It looks flat, and straight when zoomed out. If you zoom in you can see the work I did trying to get it to blend, but I don’t think it was exaggerated enough.
I learned about a really cool function in Blender called “Wall Factory” that pretty much made those walls in a single click! Very awesome!
The smaller towers connecting the walls were built using the same function, but by adding in a couple extra modifiers (“Simple Deform” to make the cylinder shape, and “Array” to make it taller). Without this built in function, this picture would definitely not have had a walled-in city haha
This tower was inspired by Lord of the Rings. I just did a couple Google searches (“LOTR tower of” and let the auto suggest fill in the names haha) for some inspiration.
And here is the original reference picture by @shaka
Thanks for following along! Hope you enjoy!