I’ve finished another Blender project—per tradition, this comes from a dream I had.

Inspiration

I dreamed I was in something like the Nintendo video game Metroid Prime. The Prime series of games features a lone human explorer making her way through alien planets. The graphic style is gritty and realistic (and it achieves realism quite well considering the age of those games); the game’s creatures, all both beautiful and terrifying, are always impressively original in their design; the levels are often industrial and rather gloomy. Whenever I’ve played these games in the past, they’ve never failed to create a tense, high-pressure mood that I find really exciting. And consistently when I’d play these games, I’d later have distinctly exciting dreams about them.

In this dream, I the player needed to escape the level, running through a dark warehouse into daylight. The warehouse was patrolled by large bug-shaped entities that seemed to be made entirely out of winding arcs of electricity. Once they saw me they’d attack, and that would start a lengthy battle, so I was aiming to just run through the area and not look back.

Subject

I’ve never tried to simulate lightning in Blender, so I looked for some YouTube tutorials. This Blender Tesla Coil Lightning Tutorial video was perfect, and fortunately the technique was very simple. I’m continually impressed by how the clever combination of a few simple art tools can produce such a wide variety of visual effects. 

The next matter was to place these lightning arcs so that they matched the shape of this bug-like creature. They needed to form a recognizable shape while still keeping the random jittery texture of lightning. And they needed to have varying density, so that I could draw attention to the key parts of the creature, namely its core, legs, and mouth parts.

I posted some videos of this process to my art Instagram account @patrickdfarley_art.

Environment

It was fairly easy to create the warehouse environment. There’s no complicated geometry to it; all the visual impact comes from the textures. I took a number of high-quality textures from Poliigon.com and combined them to create metal surfaces that were just the right kind of dingy, rusty, and worn.

Final images

I made just two images from this project. The first is the original view from my dream, though it’s viewed from a higher position so that more can be seen in a single shot.

Then I went ahead and took a simple front-on view. I especially like how the metal pipes progressively reflect the outdoor light, the creature’s light, and the darkness of the warehouse interior.