This is my rendition of the album cover of Plastic Beach by the Gorillaz. It is a low-poly reimagination of the album art that I modeled and rendered completely in Blender. It took me about a month to complete the project, which I finished in August 2019. I'm very proud of my the finished product as it took a lot of effort and was a way for me to apply what I had been learning in Blender to a personal project.
Gorillaz are one of my favorite bands. If you listened to any rock radio station in the mid-2000's you've heard the thumping bass line of Feel Good Inc. My adolescent brain never forgot that groove and it was one of the first bass lines I learned in high school when I picked up the bass guitar. Since then, I've perused their entire discography and can confidently say that the Gorillaz have had an immense impact on my life. Gorillaz have influenced my music taste and style and have introduced me to countless new artists through their many collaborations. As such, I decided to pay homage to one of my top 2 Gorillaz albums, Plastic Beach. (Link to my Demon Days album art coming soon!)
To recreate Plastic Beach, I was pushed to combine many of the Blender skills I had been learning at the time. The biggest skill that I developed was the use of Blender's sculpting tools, as seen in the landmass of the model. I followed a Youtube tutorial on sculpting a low-poly island to simplify the modeling process and add some novelty to my creation. Modeling the rest of Plastic Beach took some time but it wasn't as difficult as I didn't have to learn as many new skills.
Overall, I'm happy with the way this render turned out. It was a nice, short project with a subject that I was passionate about and I enjoyed brushing up on my Blender skills. A couple areas of improvement that I would like to work on in future projects would be:
Lighting. My render looks a little dull in comparison to the actual album art and I think this is in large part due to the lighting. The harsh lighting on the album cover really emphasizes the dark parts of the island and gives it a very plastic feel (as I'm sure it was intended to). Good lighting makes things more interesting to look at.
Water. I'm happy with the way the water turned out as the reflections look pretty spot on. However, I think there is a lot of potential to animate this model to include ocean waves and an ebb and flow. I briefly attempted this when I was working on it but since the surface height of the water was randomized, I couldn't get the animation to look smooth as the surface would just fluctuate like noise instead of flow.
Materials. I need to work on keeping my materials consistent. I usually go off of what looks good in the moment but looking at the final render from afar, I can see a pretty big difference between the land and the building materials. To make the render more aesthetic, I think the materials should be more similar.
Check out my other renders here!
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