First a quick Thumbnail to get a general idea of what I'm doing. I will usually do between 4-10 of these depending on the size of the project. These are created really quickly
(about 5-10 minutes on each)
(about 5-10 minutes on each)
With my chosen thumbnail selected I now move into Adobe Dimension and block out a rough visual with primitive shapes. My focus is pretty much on the composition and lighting at this stage so no need to worry about anything else.
I will start to create and source assets for the piece, the rocks are pretty simple you can create them in programs like Mudbox or Blenders organic sculpting tool or source them for free online.There are lots of 3d printing sites that give away royalty free models, these are easily modified and a great base to start from. I will duplicate, combine and modify its appearance in Adobe Dimension until I get the result I want. Doing it this gives me the opportunity to experiment with its form and allows me to create a wide variety of shapes quickly and easily from one(this might not be a very pro way of doing things but I have found I can spend too much time creating a realistic looking rock that sometimes wont work in the scene). This method produces some great results that I possibly wouldn't get if sculpted 8 rocks in isolation, with the added benefit of tailoring the rocks appearance to fit the scenes composition.
I start setting up my scene, I use the rocks from earlier and create a character in Adobe Fuse, pose it in Mixamo and export it out as an obj. I add a few props to it like the shield and flag and then play around with camera angles and composition.
Next I start sourcing background images from Adobe Stock. Getting the right background image at the start is so important, if you nail that it can complete transform your work(Ive seen other artists achieve some amazing results because of this).
I start to apply texture(usually created in Substance painter or obtained from Adobe Stock) and see how it reacts with my environment lighting which i applied in Adobe Dimensions match image option.
I render out my image and then bring it in to Adobe Photoshop to work up the FX such as smoke, fog and other tweaks as well as playing with the Depth layer that Adobe Dimension creates to get it looking the way I want (even ended up reworking a new adobe stock image with similar colour values, insertion of new 3d assets and then de saturated the whole thing for a moody atmosphere).
Final Image
