Revenge of the Hugh (Common Art Week 05)

 The assignment this week was to take a composition style (spiral, rule of thirds, circular) and assemble a scene with some assets from a pack. We were free to use our own models in addition, and that is what got me thinking. I had previously been tasked with making a very simple rig for a character in my tech art class, so I used a Hugh Neutron model for that. Now that I had a rigged model with textures, I figured why not use him for this assignment as well? 

As you all know too well (if you've been following this blog for a bit!), I'm a massive Star Wars fan. As a kid, one of my favorite movies was Revenge of the Sith; I remember getting emotional over Anakin and Obi Wan's battle and feeling a sense of catharsis as the tragedy played out before me. Of course, now that I'm more knowledgeable thanks to my experience in the industry I can say that it's a flawed movie, but still a very fun adventure and one of my most watched to this day. 

As such, I wanted to dedicate this assignment to Episode 3 of 6. 

My process began simply enough- grabbing a reference image of what I was going to do. I looked up Drew Struzan's work, having been a fan of his posters already, and spotted his Episode 3 poster. It was a good example of triangular composition, so all that was left was to begin working. 

Step one was to emulate the poster with my Hugh rig. Each character would become Hugh. This was easily the most entertaining part, as it was quite fun to pose Hugh around and make him act like multiple characters. 

Here are some screenshots of the posing process. I made use of some props to make sure the motion was captured well enough to convey meaning, and made some accessories so we can more easily tell him apart from the others.

The next step was to generate lighting and render out each piece of the poster separately. I could have done it all at once, but by doing one piece at a time I was able to layer them in Photoshop without a messy selection and separating segment. Here are some renders from this period.

Finally, I grabbed all the renders I'd done and made a composite work in Photoshop. After a lengthy postprocessing session and a lot of fussing over lighting, I ended up with this result! I'm quite satisfied with it, so I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did when making it!