This piece depicts a devotional candle lit for The Morrigan, a ferocious Celtic goddess associated with war and fate, who was said to decide death or victory in battle. My idea is someone has created this altar to the goddess, making an offering to ask her to spare the life of their loved one. The magical glowing triskelion carved into the table is intended to suggest The Morrigan might just be listening...
"A Candle for the Morrigan" - Rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 4
This piece was done for a month-long Art Challenge organized at work. The theme for this challenge was "Dark Fantasy." My primary objective with this piece was to explore and develop my skills in Substance Designer. All of the geometry and detail you see on the candle holder and feathers is 100% done procedurally through the material.
My final render scene with and without materials applied. Except for the candles, which I sculpted in ZBrush, almost all the detail is coming directly from materials.
Here's a closer look at the 100% procedural Morrigan Candle Holder material I developed in Substance Designer.
I tried a lot of different techniques and approaches within Designer for this project, and I loved pushing myself to learn new things. One of the parts I really enjoyed was finding ways to create different Celtic knot patterns. I used both a classic shape-transformation approach as well as a spline-based approach (see graph screenshots below); they both had their merits and it really depended on what pattern I was going for. I actually ended up using splines quite a lot in this project, since I was determined to do it all directly in Designer without any image inputs!
My material graph was quite complex, but I found that using color to help identify which output they related to when grouping nodes helped me to stay organized.
I also created a Crow Feather material in Designer for this project. I knew that the feathers weren't the primary focus, so the material is a little less polished than my primary candle holder material. I did, however, take the opportunity to expose some key parameters in Designer and export my material to Substance Painter to be able to get a few feather variations. I think even just the little bit of difference in color, shape, and feather pattern makes the final product feel a bit more realistic!
I think it's always interesting to see how a project idea begins, so here's the initial concept board I came up with when this art challenge first started! I think I did a good job of sticking to my game plan and successfully executing what I said I would do.
