Sap Sketches

3D Designer in LA

[sapsydnie]

Lestat harlequin music box. Started this project months ago and finally got around to finishing it!

🙃 animated in blender.

#lestat #interviewwiththevampire #samreid #musicbox #iwtv #thevampirearmand #armand #lesmand

[sapsydnie]

Ok this was honestly a much bigger pain than expected :D Finding a large enough shadow box ... figuring out how to mount the photos with damaging them as well finding the correct tool to cut the air craft cable ... I ended up sewing the the aircraft cable to stay in place ... But if anyone is interested this is how the display for my auction items came together! Wanted to include the clothes pins and clothesline in the display because i own so many now lol Only challenge now is hanging it up without destroying my wall!

[sapsydnie]

Auction lot came. Lots of photos! All served as dressing for Louis interior apartment. Mostly of misc extras standing outside of paris and buildings. Alot of different ones of the coven. Too much to post and most are not too exciting! Here are few highlights! Have a fun project in mind for how to display my favorites! will post when i get done :D

[sapsydnie]

Waiting patiently for season 3 ......... Armand rendered in blender, wearing his season 3 trailer fit! Fun quick animation! Ive been so busy on a new entertainment project i haven't had time to do much personal work, hoping to get back to more soon :)

[sapsydnie]

IDK if anyone is interested! but here is some insights into my process making these kind of realistic animations. Sculpting process. Luckily i already had a basic rigged figure with vampire hands (it was Armands) so i just swapped out a Lestat and Louis head I had previously made. I've made a number of animations of porcelain music boxes so i have a decent pipeline. I model all the clothing pieces separately and then remesh all of the pieces together. I generally will keep the hands and head separate to make texturing easier. Blender has a decent remesh modifier but has often caused my computer to crash if it doesn't like the geometry; getting a clean remesh also is a bit of a trail and error and generally requires cleanup. After i remesh all the pieces, I export them to a program called Instant Meshes - this is another remesh program that is better at retaining fidelity but lowers the poly count of the object. I like to keep the poly count at a reasonable level to make uving easier. Worrying about clean topology here however is not as important since these will be static.

After uving i export to Quixel Mixer, which is a free texture program from Epic Games. Its been beta for years, which is a shame because it has potential to be a great program. It can be buggy but the results are pretty good and it has many preset smart materials that i often just tweak a bit to get the desired look. Here are some of the references i was looking at for texture! I noticed the costume designer put Lestat in mostly gold accents and Louis in silver accents, so decided to do the same.

thanks for reading and for the support on the animation! It was fun to make!

[sapsydnie]

Lestat and Louis music box! Animation created and rendered in blender (along with the liquid simulations!)

Going for an antique feel with the aged metals and porcelain figures.

[sapsydnie]

Some devil's minion wallpapers to spice up your desktops <3 Rendered with blender. I started experimenting with using layer weight with emissive shaders to make a fake cartoony rim light (the red highlight). Will probably try pushing it more in the future!

[sapsydnie]

Armand and Daniel :) animated in blender, no AI

[sapsydnie]

Armand is probably the more complete 3D character i've created of my iwtv series. I try to be efficient and only build what i need because the process can be time consuming and i would still call myself a novice character builder/animator; so often the back of the head is not developed or only the clothing visible in camera is modeled. Very fun to pose!

[sapsydnie]

Two versions of this wallpaper with Armand and Daniel because i couldn't decide which one i liked more! :P

[sapsydnie]

Devil's minion living rent free in my head :) animation made in blender

[sapsydnie]

Louis wallpaper, rendered in blender

[sapsydnie]

Some fan art for Louis de Pointe du lac. Had a lot of fun sculpting his face!

Blood crying didnt appear many times on the show but i can understand somtimes it can look a little silly on real actors especially for dramatic moments. For the tears, I refitted an add on that was meant for condensation; had some bugs so i would say its not great for animations with bones 🤪

made in blender. textures also done in photoshop

[sapsydnie]

Close up of Amadeo/Arun/Armand I know there has been discourse on how different Armand looks from the figure in the original painting. My biggest issue between the two figures is that Assad has a much longer and narrower neck. His head is also thinner and taller. In general, I've found Assad's face challenging to sculpt and fussed with it for hours. I've been having fun working with more painterly textures. In blender i do a rough pass using the texture paint feature in gray scale. After that I export the flat texture and do all the color and finer details in photoshop. This includes a pass at faking the lighting and shadow in the texture. I reupload multi times as a do correction passes. anyway thank you for the support!

[sapsydnie]

Landscape version of Amadeo sitting for ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds with a Donor’ with the hand of Marius De Romanus.

[sapsydnie]

A little animation that took forever to finish due to the holidays …. LA burning … etc. A nice little distraction from my anxieties honestly.

Amadeo sitting as a figure reference for the painting ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds with a Donor’ by Palma Vecchio. He is 20 years old and resides in the studio of his master Marius De Romanus.

made with blender, textures also done with photoshop.

[sapsydnie]

I did this sketch of Armand back in october, but honestly he looks more like a young Arun or Amedeo .... innocent and a bit scared.