A Little Start To Finish on Poster Design in Blender
This poster, done for a local piano festival in Bloomington, Indiana, was made entirely in Blender 2.75 utilizing HDRI lighting and node-built materials to capture the look of a jumble of piano keys, each with the name of a headlining artist on the side.
I used the excellent Print to Render addon to just give me a rough guide for an A4 image, and everything was rendered in cycles.
Originally I built the world and worked on the flooring and the lighting, then modeled three keys according to a reference. Each has a subsurface modifier and a fairly simple material applied to it, around 5 or 6 nodes mixing diffuse with glossy. Then I rendered this out:
The first work in progress was too broody and dark.
Obviously it's too dark, but the keys look alright. So I fixed them up a little bit, they were slightly out of alighnment, then I went ahead and chucked a bunch around. I didn't bother making a rigid body simulation although it probably would have saved time in the long run as I had to check that everything looked the part. This picture above was also a bit too broody for a jolly piano festival. The second render looked like this:
The layout is starting to take shape and it's a lot brighter, but there's an issue with the face on the side of the white piano key.
I was happier with this second WIP, but there's some problems with the white model and the subdivision modifier. I modeled it in a fairly dumb way so in the end I just turned the keys around. I then refined the materials, added the text (using the opposite material for the corresponding piano key) and rendered out a final version. The text uses a velvet shader with a touch of glossy to kind of give it a funky look. I put an ivory texture into generated coordinates on the final white material, running mixed with a white glossy shader and a slightly off-white diffuse to finish.
The final output looks like this. I used a slightly wider angle lens to make everything a little more legible while giving the sensation of increased depth, along with some DOF, too. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it but it's still a little moody and the text is a touch difficult for some people to read. I don't really have any issues with it, and it should serve its purpose as an eye-catching lead poster. There's room for sponsors along the bottom, too:
