So here’s a little sketch I did using Maya with Arnold. I wanted to play with lighting scenarios and the Lighting Filters I mentioned last week.

I was originally inspired with this piece by trying to pay homage to the 19th century artists, like Jean-Leon Gerome and Ludwig Deutsch. They were part of a movement called Orientalism, which was a depiction of the Middle East thru artists from a Western culture’s perspective and interpretations.

I began researching Star Wars related elements. I wanted to incorporate, specifically a bounty hunter, but with all the attention to Boba Fett with the amazing Mandalorian I chose a more obscure one with Dengar. A friend, Brian LaFrance pointed me to a great reference gathering tool Pure Ref. You can create your own pin board of various references easily.

I was able to find low resolution models on RenderHub. There were a bunch of free Star Wars characters from a user, Rip Van Wrinkle.

From here, it was trying to figure out a layout and characters to support my main character, Dengar. For some characters and environments I swapped out textures, used megascan textures. I combined some characters together (made a jawa out of the emperor, etc).

Then just played with mood using different lights in Arnold.

It was a fun exercise. Now onto the next piece.