If you’ve seen the rest of my porfolio, you know I LOVE elemental models. Anything related to elements is my thing. Perhaps the years playing Hexen, perhaps the films I watched, I don’t know, I just have a thing for elements, so I intended this to be the crown jewel of my portfolio. Not necessarily in a literal sense, but as something I am proud of, it was originally going to be only Earth, Fire, Air and Water, but eventually I wanted to explore ice, too, then monsters, light, crystals, plasma… heck, even V6 engines! This collection of weird cubes then went on to become the “Power Cubes”.
Everything was modeled in Blender 2.79, with PBR materials, however my relatively tame rig would take ages to render in Cycles, which is why rendered in Blender Eevee, a really fast renderer with PBR support that renders sort of like a video game engine. You may call that cheating, but I call it smart. Aside from stuff like the crystals the slightly unrealistic SSS, the rest looks pretty much like the real thing and it took me mere hours to render, rather than weeks. Yes, I said weeks, I did the math, I just couldn’t afford to cripple my computer for that long, rendering this project.
In the end I was pretty satisfied with the end result and I know it could look a whole lot better, but for now that itch has been scratched, and who knows, maybe next time I will come out with “Power Spheres” or some other crazy analog to showcase my texturing abilities in another portfolio piece.