Designing Light
This 3D art and animation series was inspired by prompts from illustrator Sha’an d’Anthes’s 2023 October art challenge. I wanted to approach the series with a cohesive theme, and creating a set of lighting design pieces felt like a perfect fit for the sculptural 3D style I was approaching the challenge with, as well as an opportunity to play with light in interesting ways.
BEE 🐝 Everyone who knows me well knows my love for bees and my dream of one day becoming a beekeeper.
After sketching out an idea for a statement honeycomb chandelier, I knew Houdini was going to be an important tool for creating the complex shapes in 3D. I started by simulating a viscous lava fluid going through a ‘strainer’, creating the separated layers of honeycomb and the organic tapered shape. I then found a few super helpful tips from Arvid Schneider on creating honeycomb in Houdini, the most helpful of which was creating a hexagonal pattern by using the divide node on a triangulated mesh with ‘compute dual’ turned on. I lit the chandelier from inside to make the golden honey glow. While modeling the wooden top piece, I was inspired by the shape of the hat a beekeeper might pair with their veil.
COSMOS 🪐 Let’s take a cosmic journey!
This space-themed hanging mobile features a night sky lamp that casts tiny stars, suns, and moons onto the walls, created using Cinema 4D cloners and volume builders. By setting up the mobile with rigged bones, I was able to easily adjust the placement of individual pieces without breaking the connections between segments. The camera takes a journey through the mobile like a rocket through space, allowing for a detailed view of each object’s unique texture. My personal favorite detail is the star shaped bokeh that peeks through here and there. 🌟 This piece was chosen to be featured on the official Peachtober Instagram account, which was such a treat and honor!
GRUB 🐛 My new digital pets!
These little slugs were so fun to make! Once I modeled the basic shape, I used the C4D FFD deformer for all the pose variations. To generate ideas for the placement of the slugs on the lamp, I used a cloner with different random seeds. When I saw one with a slug curiously peeking around from the back, I knew I’d found the winner and fine-tuned the placements from there.
Using an emissive material or a point light to illuminate the slugs didn’t create the dramatic glow I wanted. Using sub-surface scattering on the slug’s material with a cylindrical area light totally surrounding each one had a much more convincing effect.
SPRIG🌿This floor lamp was inspired by childhood memories of my great-grandma’s raspberry bush.
Spline sweeps were essential for creating the curved vine shapes and the wire outlines for the leaves and petals. Cloners and volume builders were used for the raspberries. I enjoyed referencing the shapes and colors of raspberry leaves, blossoms, and berries while modeling and texturing this piece—I feel that observing and incorporating nature into my art, even when it is 100% digital, makes the results feel more grounded and meaningful. 🌸
EYE 👁️ You certainly wouldn’t feel alone if this lamp was your desk companion!
A Houdini smoke simulation is the foundation for this piece. Pushing the smoke with a strong downward force onto a ground plane creates an iris-like outward expanding circular shape, and noise-based color properties create the multicolored swirls. The lamp is designed to have a little extra personality to suit its vibrant gaze: the connected joints allow the lamp to move in an eerily character-like way.
DREAM 💤 This little plugin nightlight represents how our mind stays active and imaginative even when we go to sleep.
The outer layer was modeled with volume builders, and the inner layer was animated with a simple noise displacement. I actually had the most fun modeling the plastic outlet and switch and texturing the wall!
An interesting coincidence happened when I turned off the main room light and set a moon-toned area light to hit the lamp from the side. The shadow cast on the wall revealed what looks a little like a face in profile with colorful dreams dancing in the mind.
BLUE 🌀 This piece was a chance to have fun improvising interesting geometric shapes and playing with color, pattern, and texture.
I modeled the pendants by beveling simple geometric objects and spline wrapping the edges to create glass panes and joining solder. The chain was created with a simple but satisfying cloner. The stained glass was a great opportunity to experiment with all sorts of Redshift noises, transmission, and other special effects. After the pendants were modeled and textured, I used close up camera angles with a shallow depth of field to create more abstract compositions that emphasize the glittering hues of blue.
PENCIL ✏️ The interaction between the vibrant primary colors feels so nostalgic!
An interesting challenge for this piece was creating the torn edges of the paper lamp shades. I ended up using noise displacements to create the rough edges as well as the transition layer. For the patterns on the lamp shades, the outer blue swirls were created procedurally with a Maxon noise, and the inner red scribbles were created with an image texture. The base is inspired by a classic yellow hexagonal pencil, and the neck and switch were inspired by the texture of graphite. The initial sketch shows an earlier hanging lamp concept, but I ended up creating the base to incorporate more pencil-inspired elements.
GARDEN 💐 An upside down flower garden.
These ethereal floral lamps hang from the ceiling of a greenhouse. To achieve the shape of the fabric petals, I modeled simple flower shapes and ran them through a cloth simulation, froze them on a frame I liked, and used the same spline wrap technique as the ‘sprig’ lamp to create the wire outlines. The fabric texture is very sheer, and I think the layering created by the semi-transparency creates some of the most interesting interactions in the piece.
SNOOZE ⏰ 11:11, make a wish!
Creating this piece felt like designing a product, which I actually really enjoyed. I also enjoyed the 2D design elements that went into this piece, especially the typography. After completing this series, I went on to create a motion design short inspired by this little clock.
CANDLE 🕯️ Because this prompt was a pretty literal fit for my theme, I chose to get creative with the candle holder.
I sketched out several ideas before settling on this plant root-inspired design. Volume builders and noise displacements served as the foundation for building the strange, sculptural, welded look. I then hopped into Houdini to build, melt, and add flame to the spiral candlestick.
CORAL 🪸 Inspired by nature’s sculptures.
For this final piece, I experimented with different procedural organic coral shapes and patterns in Houdini, then arranged them to form this mounted corner lamp. The texture makes the piece feel like cast metal, and the intense warm light brings more clarity to the different forms and layers.
Context
Personal 3D Art Series
Roles
Design & 3D Production
Tools
Cinema 4D, Houdini, Redshift Render