JUSTIN SADO
Technical Artist & Engineer
ROTTEN FUTURE
Character Modeling | PBR Shaders | Lighting
Fig 1: Rotten Future
The distance between us and our digital media soon diminishes to a pinpoint. It's a notion less readily known than consumed, spiraling into increasingly cynical content whose message can scarcely be teased apart from their medium: that our future is rotten, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
In this grim, dystopian, cyberpunk scene, an array of looming LCD-screens each depict stills from grim, dystopian, cyberpunk films or TV, cementing the piece's irony. Cluttering its composition are countless cables and cords, converging on a subject whose biology has twisted around the very act of a consumption. By now, it's unclear even where he ends and the screens begin; consuming and becoming thus happen simultaneously, here, in the future we so love to look at.
Breakdown
Sculpting and materials took center-stage in the making of this render; once the subject's body began to take shape, it was quickly torn apart and melted onto the CRT beneath him, with his legs, right arm, and jaw all removed.
The scene's props were each, likewise, modeled by hand, with the exception of its myriad cables. The cables consisted of Bezier curves passed through a geometry node-group whose parameters dictated the number of wires, their radii, and the cable-ties around them.
Fig 2: Rotten Future white render
Once the scene was constructed, its surfaces were outfitted with photo-realistic PBR materials. The subject's skin was textured from scratch, with its albedo, roughness, and subsurface-scattering maps all generated with Substance Painter.