Memento mori

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Memento mori

This is a personal project that started as a simple study of Substance Painter, which I used a candle holder I have modeled a while ago, and became a very interesting project.

First idea was to create a minimalist scenario just to showcase the model and material, and searching for references, I found a lot of inspiring dead nature paintings, since candles and lamps are common elements on this type of art. Among all the references I had, the ones I liked most, were "Vanitas" paintings.

Vanitas (Latin: Vanity) is a genre of still life artwork that appeared in Europe in the early 17th and it sought to show the certainty of death and worthlessness of worldly goods and pleasures. Some elements are standard in this category of art: symbols of arts and science, wealth and power, earthly pleasures, symbols of death and sometimes symbols of eternal life.

The title "Memento mori" is a Latin expression and means "remember that you will die" and in art are artistic and symbolic reminders of mortality, as burning candles and clocks.

Artwork - Memento mori

Details

All assets in the scene as well some that were not been used.

All the models and UVs were created from scratch using Autodesk Maya. The candle I made in ZBrush and used Reaflow to simulate the melted wax.

The textures were done in Susbtance Painter and I used some textures from Megascan. I liked a lot to work with Substance Painter and the workflow is really smooth.

Afterwards, I've used V-ray to output my passes and Nuke to comping them. Finally, I used Lightroom for the final touch.

The first three images are the brass material I did, which afterwards I used as a base layer for the second version with engraved patterns. The UV, between the two version, is different since I had to apply the patterns. I am using 3 UDIMs for the candle holder, because I would like to have some closeups and see the workflow of it in Maya.

I am a composite enthusiastic since 2009, when I started to use Fusion to comping my renders. Two years ago I have tried Nuke for a personal project and I decided to use it now instead of Photoshop, even though it was still frame.

I used Nuke's particle system to create the air dust pass, which gave me a nice control of it.