SMIGONAUT COVER ART
SMIGONAUT - “THICK AS THIEVES” COVER ART
Cover art that I made for alternative electronic music artist Smigonaut’s new single, “Thick as Thieves”, which you can check out here!
Smigonaut wanted a cartoony-style, aquatic theme. The abstract “submarine” was modeled using Womp and then brought into Houdini to clean up the topology and colors and add small details like the windows. The rest was done in Houdini. The little scary fish in the background was a model I grabbed from Ida Faber on Sketchfab.
SMIGONAUT - “2023 MINIMIX” COVER ART
Cover art that I made for alternative electronic music artist Smigonaut’s 2023 Minimix, which you can check out here!
For this one, I tried to keep the same aquatic theme, but rather than having a light, cartoony shot like I had for “Thick as Thieves”, I wanted to explore the depths of the ocean and the creepy things lurking deep in the abyss. This piece was made fully in Houdini (besides the eyeball model). The eyelid was made using VDBs from the original eyeball, and the veins were made using a find shortest path algorithm.
Check out some of the original concepts and work-in-progress shots below!
This was the initial concept: much less spooky and more of an abstract coral reef. With this, although I liked the shot and the geometry, I felt like it was missing a main subject or focal point. After trying several different camera angles and compositions, I decided to scrap it for a different approach.
For this, I used a mixture of particle simulations, custom growth solvers, and VDB workflows to make a large, alien-like reef geometry.
Initial lighting and material tests. At this point, I was trying to do brighter, happier lighting to contrast the creepiness of the eyeball. My concern was that dark, dramatic lighting might lean in to the eeriness too much and make the cover art more unsettling than we were hoping for.
Little overview of what the full geometry looked like.
Dialing in the look of the new lighting with some additional, smaller lights. What I really love about this newer lighting is that, although it’s very dramatic and moody, it actually feels more mystical and magical than it does creepy and unsettling.
Original sculpt I made in Womp a few months ago that inspired the design for the submarine.
Submarine sculpt in Womp prior to Houdini clean-up.
Initial geo of the eyeball and veins
This was the “final” lighting for the brighter look. After rendering this out, I felt like the piece felt a little too flat, the lighting a bit too uniform, and it wasn’t really a cohesive piece. It felt like it was missing something, and I suspected the lighting was to blame here.
In order to experiment with some different lighting approaches, I decided to use Houdini’s (relatively) new paint-with-lights approach to lighting in Solaris — basically you select a light, then select specular, diffuse, or shadows, and then click on your geometry and it will cast your selection onto that part of the geometry. While trying to focus on the backlighting to show off some of the subsurface scattering, I stumbled on this darker look that I really liked where the majority of the lighting actually comes from the backlight.
And the final!