Emission Series
A series of emissive glass-blur compositions exploring grid, shape, and 3D execution.
A collection of explorations of grid, layout, shape, composition, and 3D execution. I started with a simple concept of a circle and a line. These shapes both had a varied level of emission, along with a scattering layer applied on top. After defining the look I began to iterate — each iteration I would duplicate the setup, create a new illustration, transition that into a 3D scene, and then recompose the final output.
Process
- Illustrations started in Illustrator and were exported to make the geometry in C4D.
- The base render of all the emissive shapes and subtle light reflecting across the glass is done in Octane — I was never able to fully recreate this in Redshift.
- Everything is shot through a top layer of a variably blurry glass material — a big, blurry black-and-white oval that creates the falloff of the blur on the edges and a sharp/blurry zone.
- The shapes below the glass layer are extremely bright emissive material shapes sitting on a barely-noticeable floor that subtly catches light. Without that floor, the whole sense of depth falls apart.
- The base render is pretty boring on its own — the magic comes with a slight curves adjustment that brings the blues into the shadows, pushes the mids toward orange, and the brights toward white. Found by flipping through the LUTs in Octane and then recreating a version of that in Photoshop / AE curves.
- Base renders were extremely noisy even after 20,000 samples and required some tricky denoising.