Oculus

Finally, after a journey halfway around the world, the Eye of the Gods illuminated him! As he gazed upward Bernard captured a fragment of its majesty in his small lens, encoding the reality into a frozen moment of time that he would always treasure. To visit Rome and bask in the illuminating glow of the Oculus, under the dome of the Pantheon, Temple of all Gods, had long been his dream....

Since I've now become pretty adept using at most of the programs in my digital toolbox I decided that this time around I would try to make life easier for myself; using whichever tool does a certain task most efficiently. My goal was higher quality in a shorter amount of time than my past attempts. It's a workflow that served me well and that I will definitely use from now on :)

The Dome
The dome started as a hemisphere mesh – using various insets and extrudes I created the "tiles" and I opened up the oculus area by deleting the top triangles from the mesh, then extruding the edge loop upward a few times. After some additional subdivision to have an adequate number of faces for "sculpting" I used Silo's displacement brush to create some cracks and imperfections, and ZBrush for some overall subtle fractal noise to displace the surface just a bit (hey, it's an old building!). UVs unwrapped in Silo and textured using a combination of image maps and SDL procedurals. Converted to Mesh2 via PoseRay.

The Camera
My idea of creating a handheld point and shoot digital camera turned into a 2 day modeling project. It took quite a bit longer than I expected to finish it, but only because I got carried away with the details and modeled the entire camera for future use (instead of just the back as would be seen in this shot). UVs unwrapped and exported to Photoshop for precision image mapping, then textured using standard SDL techniques for pigment/normal/finish. Converted to Mesh2 via PoseRay.

The Hand and Arm
The hand/arm is from the Poser 8 Ryan model, meticulously posed in Poser and exported as OBJ, imported into Silo and amputated with a brutal bulk polygon deletion to remove the rest of the model. Finally, smoothed to a hi-res mesh and touched up a bit in ZBrush and converted to Mesh2 via PoseRay. A light_group provided some rim and fill lighting to punch up the hand, arm, and camera.

Note: The glare effect from the oculus is the result of image_pattern masks mapped to three planes - two placed between the hand and the oculus, and one directly in front of the render camera for some overall bloom. See my WIP thread in the forums for more info :)