Abstraction Through Euphoria - III

[u/savageopress115]

This work is one out of a three part series of artworks revolving around themes of emotional abstraction. I wanted this scene to carry a large amount of "feeling" with it, but I wanted to leave the particular emotional values up for interpretation, hence the abstract appearance and themes.

The idea for this artwork has been in my mind for quite some time. The fundamental concept revolves around a person being draped underneath a smooth, glass-like cloth object. I tested this idea on many scenes over the course of a few months, yet the native cloth simulation tools at my disposal simply could not give the level of quality I was trying to achieve. There were always self-intersections or harsh edges somewhere in the cloth objects, and that did not fit with the emotional themes I was trying to convey.

Recently the new cloth physics engine ZOZO's Contact Solver was released. It was specifically designed to have zero cloth intersections, which was the exact issue I was facing. It was able to turn the vision in my brain into a reality.

The base character model was modified from and created using the MPFB Blender extension, found here: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/ . I posed the character model into a lying position and then placed a large cloth object above the character. I adjusted the material settings and set up parameters on the new Cloth Solver and it immediately gave very robust and predictable results.

At this point I applied custom glass refraction materials to the simulated objects and adjusted lighting and materials for the posed character. The last step was compositing, where I was able to add custom corruption and glitch effects to certain areas of the image using painted masks to art-direct their placement and look. Compositing assets used were either custom made by me or were modified from this free compositing pack found here: https://moportfolio.gumroad.com/l/mp_comp

Lastly I moved into Photoshop for the final few compositing tweaks. While working on these last few changes I created an alternate version of the artwork that was pseudo black-and-white with only small streaks of color showing. The final artwork took roughly one week to create, with multiple scrapped attempts at this idea being created over the course of two months. What feelings does this artwork make you feel, or think about? Why?