INTRODUCTION
Hi, my name is Ali Hoff. I’m a self-taught freelance 3D artist based in the southwest of England. I have been using Blender for over 4 years and am currently working on various projects, such as music videos, short films, album artwork, and concept art.
INSPIRATION
The inspiration for this piece was a mix of retro sci-fi from artists, such as Moebius and Roger Dean, classic surrealists like Dali, and indie games, such as Journey and the Risk of Rain series.
TEXTURING
I used Cycles toon shaders for this piece. Many of them are very simple with just a gradient color.
LIGHTING
The lighting is also very simple with just one sun lamp set to a high strength. This, combined with a light blue world shader set to a low strength, lets me pick the shadow color.
FREESTYLE OUTLINE
For the outline on the foreground objects, I used the Freestyle line set within Blender. I used the ‘Along Stroke’ modifier within Freestyle to make the line trail off slightly, which gives it a bit more of a hand-drawn look.
The project was split up into 4 layers: the character and foreground, the dunes in the midground, the buildings, and then the background, which is just an image on a plane.
With each layer rendered out separately in the compositor, I made tweaks to color, added some dust images between layers, and then made some other final tweaks to the whole image, such as softening and sharpening, chromatic aberration, and film grain to give the piece a bit of a retro feel.
SUN BLEACHED
Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoyed reading this article and learned something useful from it.
Have a nice day!
About the Artist
Ali Hoff, a freelance 3D artist based in the southwest of England who is currently working on various projects.
