Thomas Bailey-Byrne
Draft Portfolio
My Top Four Projects
I made this low-poly 3D environment in Blender over a few weeks. I started by creating the forest out of one low-poly tree that I spread with random size and rotation over a large plane using a particle system. Next, I created the well over 3 stages, initially, It was just the brickwork, but eventually, I added the roof and then the bucket and ivy. Also, I used a particle system to make falling leaves, grass and flowers that have procedural variation in colour. On the topic of procedural textures, all the materials in this scene are either flat colour or procedural materials that I made in Blender. To finish this piece, I added the fox with the flower because I had an issue in that before the fox, the image looked just to be a random well in a forest, however, with the fox and its flower, the scene has more of a story as the title suggests. One of my main focuses on this image was focusing on getting the lighting right. The main thing I did to do this was to position the trees in such a way that light only illuminated parts of the forest floor that I wanted the viewer to notice. Secondly, after producing a dozen renders, I finally made a final render that I was happy to take to compositing, to do this I first took the image into an image editing program to lighten the fox head tail and the well roof. Furthermore, I imported that image into the Blender compositor where I added bloom which was especially apparent in the areas that I just lightened. Also, in the compositor I an array of colour ramps, curves and other tools to adjust the colours and values in the scene, mainly I focused on making the shadowed grass the right contrast and value while keeping a lot of light and colour in the highlights without losing detail or becoming too contrasted which was one of the greatest challenges of this piece. Overall compositing and lighting, and composition are what I spent most of my time on in this piece and I am happy with the result, in fact, it is the first image I have made that I have considered good enough for me to use as my desktop background, however, while it has been there, I eventually noticed a couple of areas to be improved. Firstly, the lack of dithering causes banding at the edges of the volumetrically lit areas. Secondly, some of the ivy clips through the well. Finally, in the early stages of making this piece, I used subsurface scattering in the trees which looked good, however, I decided to stop using it as it tripled render times; now that the scene is finalized I could try to do another final render with more dithering, no ivy clipping and subsurface scattering in the trees.
Conway Castle- Painting/Illustration
Pen-y-ghent- Digital & Oil Pastel
I made the piece on left based from a photo that I took at Mt.Pen-y-Ghent. I digitally painted the background and the foreground. One of the main challenges in painting the background was creating the right mix of colour and texture to create the illusion of the mixture of grass, moss and plants that litter the landscape. In the foreground, however, in order to bring more detail, I made a custom stamp brush to avoid having to hand paint thousands of grass blades. The wall, however, was not made digitally, instead, I made it by covering paper in a thin layer of grey with oil pastel, before drawing over it with graphite pencils, allowing me to have a very specific range of values, with no extra highlights unless I scraped oil pastel off the paper. If I was to improve this piece, I would work on blending the background into the foreground better; although the wall works well to separate the two spaces, I feel that the closer part of the background should reveal more detail so that it transitions to the foreground smoother, resulting in more overall depth to the piece.
Wild Wishing Well- 3D Low-Poly
I made this piece in four stages, firstly I gathered the right source material- during a visit to Conwy Castle in Wales I took a number of photos, many of which I wanted to paint. I chose to use this scene for the painting because it had a number of layers of from the foreground to the background including a lack of a sealing/floor, which lets the viewer see up through the floor above and through a door frame. Furthermore, I like the composition caused by these layers because of how the foreground walls are dark, the mid-ground is mid-tone and the background is very bright which brings further depth to the very dimensional/geometric scene. The next step in creating this piece was drawing each individual brick by hand in Corel Painter with a black pencil/line style brush. This process took a lot of time because I drew each brick individually and as such this line layer was definitely the main difficulty with this piece. After making the line layer, I created a layer under it so that I could paint in the brick colours under the line layer. This part of the process was a lot quicker because I didn't need to paint in every prick individually, however, It still took a fair amount of time. After combining the painted layer with the line layer I had a result which appeared very close to the original picture. However, I never intended to stay true to the original primary photograph because on the day I took it the weather was overcast and as a result, all of my photos had dull lighting. To improve the lighting in my digital scene I made a few layers for post-processing. The goal of this was to make the illusion that I flooded the scene with direct light coming from the top right which brightened the mid-ground (with some dust and sun-ray effects) while making the background even brighter. Overall I think this piece was a success, it's definitely my most detailed digital painting/drawing, however, this came at a cost of time.
The Tripods Book Cover- 3D & 2D
The Tripods is a series of books by John Christoper. The series was originally a trilogy, however, Christopher latter added a prequel called 'When The Tripods Came' which was about when an alien species invaded earth with their Tripod machines. Because this was the final piece for my biggest art & design project yet, I spent a lot of time making it, especially in pre-production stages. During the latter part of the research stage of this project, I made a few thumbnails and one book cover for some other books as well as an architectural thumbnail design that showed other ways I could represent the theme. Speaking of which, the theme for this project was mechanical vs natural forms which is why after the research stage of my project, I was set on making a book cover for one of the books for the tripods series, specifically the prequel book because of I felt the idea of these mechanical tripods invading Earth fit very well to the theme & brief. As you can see in the images above, I created an array of thumbnail designs for the tripods and a variety of possible backgrounds. I chose this tripod design because I felt it was a good mix of mechanical and alien forms, also, unlike some of my other designs this design doesn't look like a pokéball. Making these concept designs was one of the best parts of this project because it was a very creative process. Furthermore, I also liked creating the environment concept designs and I had no problems with either of these stages. The background that I chose to develop I felt stood out because it directly shows the mechanical tripod vs nature, just like the theme. I made this background on 7 layers and textured those layers onto spheres with emission shaders around the Tripod 3D model which meant the tripod was light by the background very well, and I think this process is the best part of this piece because of how it ties the 2D environment in with the 3D Tripod. Overall, in creating this piece I had no major difficulties or struggles, the only problem was that because it took a long time to make the final tripod and background, I didn't have time to make any other book covers.