Bewitched pumpkins

Dear readers, the day has finally come when I show you my little treasures. They are round, with slightly pointy ends and they glow in the dark. Also, there are four of them. My precious—pumpkins! 

(What?)

I was working on them every spare moment I had in-between the multitude of shading and lighting assignments. And since there were fewer of those moments than I'd hoped for, I almost didn't manage to finish on time. Almost. In the end I had about a day left, because the scene did that weird thing when it went from a potato to a decent render in about an hour. You can't really plan for that, which makes it even more stressful when it stubbornly refuses to leave the potato state. But I digress.

I know I didn't go into much detail in my recent posts. That was because lighting and shading is difficult to describe step by step. Whereas here, I'm not going to go into much detail because I simply don't remember what I did in those two weeks. Ehm. With that said, though, let's try for some sort of description anyway.

I started, surprisingly enough, with the pumpkin models. A simple sphere was all that was needed. Well, maybe with a few adjustments, since the default topology wasn't good enough for the top and bottom part. Then I pumpkinized the shape in the sculpting mode (with DynTopo disabled). At this stage I thought I could avoid retopology later down the road. With the basic shape finished, I duplicated the mesh and did some DynTopo sculpting on top of it. Then I shrinkwrapped the original base shape on top of it... only to find out that the indents are irregular and I'll need to shuffle things around anyway. Enter retopology. 

I must have mentioned it here before, but I'm quite happy with the RetopoFlow 2.0 add-on. It helped me adjust the shape so quickly that I also opted for some larger changes to get a cleaner mesh. I've even started considering retopology as a possible source of freelance work. But that's for a different blog post. When I had the pumpkin body ready, I turned my attention to the stem. Nothing too complicated again, just a fancy cylinder with a few ribs.

Since I wanted to prototype this a little bit, I continued working on the first pumpkin in Substance Painter. I surprised myself with a fairly believable pumpkin material—with a dark twist. You see, I had to use something as a base texture and the best my meagre collection of organic materials could offer was... human skin. Yes, you read that right. My pumpkins are made of people. With a few dots and stains and colour variations on top.

Once I had the material ready, I imported the textures back to Blender to see how different they'd look. Luckily for me, Blender behaved well this time and the materials are quite comparable. Many details are lost, but the overall impression is still quite alright. With more confidence poured into my pumpkin process, I turned to the rest of the bad boys. I didn't want to copy-paste things too much, so I manually adjusted each individually. I didn't completely re-sculpt them, but I duplicated the retopologized mesh and I highlighted the details with MultiRes sculpting. Four times. And it was those four pumpkins that eventually found their way into the final render. The original pumpkin is sadly sitting in one of the invisible layers. Poor guy. 

In Substance Painter, I re-used the same material, but I was able to make some significant changes in every iteration, so no two pumpkins are quite the same. And now, to the carving bit. I knew what I wanted to achieve, but I overestimated my (in)ability to draw. You see, I've been hearing great things about the new Grease Pencil in 2.8 and I wanted to try it out. I wanted to "animate" a transition from a cat to a witch. Easier said than done, really. After a frustrating afternoon when I tried to attack the problem from all angles, I was forced to give up and find a suitable gif instead. Which was incidentally also easier said than done. In the end I settled for a gif from www.fg-a.com. (It only has four frames, which is why I had to abandon the fifth pumpkin.)

I decomposed the gif into black-and-white frames which I then used as a factor between pumpkin material and a transparent one. It worked much better than I thought it would. With a simple light inside each pumpkin the illusion is fairly believable, I think. I decided to improve the carving a little bit and I drew over the black and white portions of the carving to make them stand out more. I also created a custom brush from a procedural noise, to make the carved edges a bit rougher and random.

With all of that done I made the rest of the scene. That's some lazy storytelling right there, but it was comparatively much shorter process than what I just described. The fireplace is built from simple shapes that look reasonable only because of the Substance material. The candlestick holders and mirror frame popped into existence in about two minutes, thanks to the amazing Screw modifier. And the rock wall is nothing more than a plane with a few modifiers and micro-displaced texture. Funnily enough, I spent more time on picking an image for the mirror reflection. I needed something that would fit into the lighting without being a distraction. Almost an impossible task.

And then there was the last few minutes of rendering and cleaning up. Which turned into an hour and half of a nerve-wracking, hair-pulling drama. For some reason—and don't ask me why, because I'm at my wit's end—the micro-displacement decided to stop working the moment I packed the textures into the blend file. I've never seen that happen before so I was quite taken aback when my supposedly final-final render turned out very different from what it was supposed to be. Nevertheless, I managed to render it eventually and I submitted it to the contest page without further issues. Here is its description:

Inspiration is weird. I'd never have tried to "animate" carved pumpkins had I not been thinking about buying The Animator's Survival Kit. Inside, there is an inconspicuous passage about old Egyptians painting posed characters on columns to achieve the illusion of movement. 3618 years later there is now a virtual family doomed to watch a moving witch every time they walk past the fireplace. May that become a new trend in pumpkin carving.

I'm quite proud of that one, actually. I've written far worse things at half past midnight.

And that will be all for this week. I'll have to pick up steam next week because I was slacking for most of this one (the contest ended on the 31st). I'm considering a few options, but I haven't decided for any single one. Knowing myself, there is no point in telling you, because I'll change it twenty more times by the end of the week. So... see you then!