May 5, 2021
Covid Monster
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Trying to find a little humor during the pandemic, I came up with an idea for a quick project. It began in my head with the image of people shrinking down to a microscopic level to fight off the Covid-19 virus firsthand. Then I thought, “What if Covid fought back?”
When planning out how to create this 3D render, I utilized some of the same skills I’ve used in the past to create medical models and animations. Inspired by more “scientifically accurate” renditions, I stepped away and started having fun with it, playing with everything from scale, color, and shape. The focus of the piece easily became the Covid “monster” I had been imagining in my head. It was large, threatening, and imposing, and yet silly, if not quite cartoonish.
For the design of the monster, I went with a simple design that would be easily recognizable as a Covid cell, which many of us had grown very familiar with at this point. When gathering references for the look, I found several depictions of Covid as a monster, though still, I tried to make it in my own style. As much as I could. After coming up with a design I was happy with, I created a base model in Maya that fit the general shape before importing that mesh into Zbrush to sculpt in some more detail, then bring that model into Substance Painter for texturing. In Substance, I played around with several different base materials and colors until I found the right color palette.
For the human characters, I used Adobe’s Muse to generate a generic male-human model. I used this model to create a diving suit, then modeled the rest of the diving equipment: flippers, mask, oxygen tank, etc. Then added these to the model. I imported my diver model into Substance for texturing and used Maya and Mixamo to rig the character and pose it in the scene. After creating three distinct diver assets, I referenced them in the main scene, each posed differently in the shot.
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With all assets gathered, I created some lights and a camera to render the shot. Using an array of different render layers, I brought them into After Effects, played with the settings and opacities to get a better-looking image. Finally, I added a few effects and tiny details, such as particles and bubbles, to enhance the image in post and called this project complete.
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