Software: Blender + Cycles, Photoshop, After Effects

Greed Island

Greed Island is a location from the manga and anime series Hunter x Hunter. I originally created a different version of this piece during the summer of 2020 as a method of practicing photorealism by attempting to recreate animated backgrounds in 3D. I decided to recreate this piece as the original was lacking the depth and scale of this setting. This is a project I continually visit to asses and gauge my improvement.

Greed Island is meant to be a vast landscape and the structure is supposed to be colossal. My original composition was too flat and didn’t accurately represent the scale of setting. I looked at Dutch landscape paintings to see how they conveyed the depth and vastness of their landscapes. I also decided to work in a wider aspect ratio to attempt to further push the concept of scale in the landscape.

Since this newer composition was significantly larger and has a lot more depth, it made sense to divide the composition into elements based on depth. So, each element was rendered separately and then composited in AfterEffects to save on computing power and render time.

These textures were made in Photoshop the first time I completed this project. Each texture is tile-able and were made to show the building from each angle. Displacement and roughness maps were taken from other rock textures.

Early Composition Exploration