A weekee-greeting to all hivers!! This afternoon I was texturing Gemino's game model, thinking about a render to make with it in the future. Suddenly I imagined its crystals glowing inside some dark place, like a cave. What I pictured in my mind was so amazing that I was eager to make it come to reality. And guess what, I couldn't hold it much longer xD

I took the unfinished model and made the rigging quickly. Did some posing tests, it was more than ready.

I left the poor guy with no eyes, but honestly this gave me another idea that even improved the render later. Added some planes and quickly made them look like rock textures. Had experience already with this when I made the mountains of the forest environment.

I posed Gemino inside, looking at the entrance of the cave. Made everything dark and started adding lights to the interior of the transparent crystals. Looking great already :3, maybe it was a bit too dark in there, problem I solved eventually by doing consecutive render tests.

The idea I had for the eyes was to make them glow too :D It looked like Gemino had been awaken from his deep slumber, and that made it furious...

After the light problem was solved, something was still missing. The crystals didn't look like crystals, they were too smooth. So I added a slight cartoon-like outline to them.

That was it!

Final Res...

...sult?


... I don't like it. It's not good enough. ... Nah it wasn't good at all. I needed to push it further, the more I looked at it the more it sucked for my eyes... They say artists are never satisfied with what they make no matter how good or masterpiece it gets to be, that's why they're called artists. Time to get serious now.

I thought about filling the cave with glowing crystals, but it felt too generic. And I wanted Gemino to be the star here. Hmm... What if it was readying an attack?? A crystal attack... Yeah, a massive cloud of floating glowing crystal particles... Perfect.

I made these two little glowing crystal meshes to generate them randomly around the cave using a particle system.

Awesome, but a bit too dark back there. I needed something that made it feel like a real natural ambientation, not just pure black.

F o g .

May look like an insignificant change, but I think it was the most important. Now Gemino IS is a cave.

Turned the emitter on again, added some additional settings like motion blur and gloom and finally hit render.

Final Result - The Cave Crystal Monster

Taking advantage of the proportions, I considered it was perfect for the solo creatures collection cards, so I did a quick montage using the Holo version of the card frame.

Card Version

Making renders has made me remember the old times... The good old times... Just for the fun of it I used to make stylized custom Minecraft renders quite frequently for a website I was part of some years ago, using simpler but also powerful softwares. I have lost with time some of my magic, specially with lighting and camera angles, I'm learning and re-learning a lot while doing these new render posts. It makes me so happy to be back with this old hobby... maybe old passion of mine.

Thank you for stopping by, hope you liked this one :3 read you on the next post!!

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_{*All images are renders/screenshots of my progress in the Blender project.*}