0x151e86b0…cfe9sent to0x068c8208…5390·#18,763,303·view on Etherscan
0x151E···CFE9An artwork on the burden of leaving childhood and accepting adult responsibilities.
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Introduction
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Wait Here is an artwork I was working on while stuck in a darker place and needed to vent. The key theme of the piece is growing up and accepting adult responsibilities. That has been a long-term mental health theme for me.
Motivation and the general idea
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I have always loved gas stations, they are places of ultimate vibe. Regardless of the time of day, weather or the season of the year you can always find a very specific atmosphere there. Maybe it's the liminality of such places that evoked the artwork idea in me.
The theme itself is not as nostalgic as the others I usually work on, and my key motivation here was not to bring nostalgia, rather to symbolically represent a child-to-adult transition process.
The idea behind depicting this transition was to visually show contradictions between a childlike freeness and an adult control.
– As a child you operate authentically, you do what you want, say what you want. You are pure and living in terms of your Nature. Whereas as an adult, you generally try to be in control of everything you do, you are artificially co-creating and operating within the patterns of the adult world.
– As a child most of your life is organic, free-flowing just like a sunshine, wind or water. As an adult, everything is orchestrated, similarly to the neon lights or the queueing of the cars on the station.
The in-between is the transition. The moment of change when you go from being a passenger to being behind the wheel. This process is just like stopping on a gas station, it's only for a while. You refuel and go down your way. You have no business staying here for long.
Technicals
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Wait Here is quite different to my usual pieces. When you look at the artwork, you can see it's still based on an atmospheric animation that combines aspects of photo-realism with cartoon elements such as black strokes or cell shading, but I tried a few things differently.
– New aspect ratio. My 1/1s had always came in square aspect ratios. For the sake of a bit experimentation and trying new perspectives for the wide environment I updated to 1.33:1. This gave me a better position for setting up an environment layout, especially the one with a wide flat roof of the gas station.
– The cars are not of my creation. I put a big amount of effort into my pieces so using paid or free model/texture libraries saves me a lot of time and energy.
– Dynamic-er.There is more movement than usual, especially the cars passing each other on the main street. Animating that was fun and pain in the ass.
– Consistent approach. I usually jump in-between tasks frantically. Here I decided to take a more consistent approach and I did a proper order of work for once.
Modeling -> Texturing -> Lights -> Rendering, Postproduction and the rest of polishing works.
The work on this piece consumed about 2 weeks of my time. The most intense phases were texturing that consumed about half of it, and then final lighting, rendering and post production. The scene set is very extensive so it was getting pretty performance-heavy and slow towards the end.
I am very satisfied with the result, I generated a lot of effort and tried many new things working on it, and I feel that the message the piece was supposed to convey is there, at least for me.
Challenges
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As with any other artwork, there were challenges on the way to the final piece. Those are the most important of them.
– The windows of the surrounding buildings and the gas station are all textures, not models. I created those in Affinity Photo in base colours (teal and yellow) and then adjusted saturations, glossiness and how much they light up in Blender and After Effects.
– Performance was pain in the ass. I work on MacBook Pro M1. Although it is pretty good work station, it struggled a bit with this piece. During the final phases where I was just adjusting details and environmental vibe it was getting pretty heavy. At one point the latency between my click and Blender's reaction to it was about 2 seconds, not great (but again, I am no optimisation wizard).
– The cloud is my favourite final touch. Originally I created it in Blender using crazy 1 hour long tutorial, but the scene got so laggy that I had to take different approach. The cloud is from a 2D texture that I photoshopped (affinity photoed?) out of the sky and colour graded to align it with the overall vibe of the scene.
Then I tracked the motion of the piece in post production and uploaded the 2D cloud into the scene. Thanks to the motion tracking it's movement is aligned to the animation. Gotta pat myself on the back, it was like the second time I was doing something like that.
– The houses were fun. Most of them are built/modelled upon the same basis and have changed texture/colour to make the scene more variable.
Final thoughts
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Wait Here was created during a not-so-good mental state of mine. Some deep personal issues had been taking a toll on me for a few months prior and this artwork was one of the vents.
I am glad I followed the inspiration for an artwork different than usual because I imprinted what was inside of me into this.
Now I can always go back and look at it to reflect.