Recently, Stacey stumbled upon this adorable mini-house and knew we wanted to create an image that was inspired by the idea of micro-scale with macro-objects.
After brainstorming, we decided it would be fun to stick a house inside a bottle. To begin the process we pulled reference swipe of other house designs and bottle styles we liked.
Stacey sketched the idea of a miniature house built inside a bottle.
Once we decided on the specific design and details, Jason built a CG carboy bottle and 2-story CG house in Maya. He then handed these to Stacey for fine-tuning in Zbrush where she added decorative moldings and created texture with alpha stencils she made in photoshop.
In the meantime, Jason created dune grasses in Maya Paint Effects and crafted a sandy beach.
The next step was to create color studies for the house. Stacey used Jason’s initial work-in-progress files of the grass and bottle files and added a temp sky from our library to create a color mock-up.
Once we had a sense of the best overall color placement, the 3D models were brought into Substance Painter where Stacey applied custom created wood planks, masonry, and painted interior scenes with emissive interior lighting.
Jason then took the textured house back into Maya and placed it inside the bottle. He put these on the beach dunes and added the ambient lighting of a warm, sunset sky. This was rendered and sent to photoshop for final finishing.
Stacey composited images of clouds, the ocean, hills and seagulls from the extensive Ransom & Mitchell library to complete the distant beach scene. After the background photographs were stitched into the scene, Jason fine-tuned the wash of warm light that cascaded across the foreground.
This back and forth throughout the creation process is very typical of our work flow and we truly value the fine-tuning details that we each notice after being “away” from the work.