The Story
This Project was an entry into a contest put on by the Rookies. The Rookies is a website and community that helps those rising in the industry to practice their skills and get their name out there through multiple means. One of these means is through monthly and annual contests, this entry being part of one of those monthly challenges.
The prompt for this contest was, "System Error." It was specified that this term could be taken as literal or figurative as we wanted. The only stipulation was that the error - the disruption - had to be the focal point of the project. With this in mind, I chose to take the figurative route.
The Meaning
After brainstorming several ideas, I decided to go with the figurative route. I knew that most entries would have to do with technological errors, but I wanted to find something that might stand out. What's something in nature or in the real world that is commonly attributed to an error? That's when I came across the idea of a black sheep.
Black sheep have always been seen as the outcasts and errors, in both the literal sense and the figurative sense. In literal sense of nature, if you were to look upon a flock of white sheep, your eyes would immediately be drawn to the dark deviation in the crowd. Naturally, it looks as though that singular sheep doesn't belong with the rest; it appears to be an error in nature, now leaving the sheep to look estranged amongst its peers. In figurative sense of life, we often call rebels and people who are not normal, "black sheep." In a certain way, this term is used because they seem to be an error to the cultural norm - just like a black sheep seems to be an error to its flock.
I wanted to capture this stark contrast.
The black sheep, while seemingly an error, stands tall. Some sheep appear to dislike it, while others appear to be intrigued by it. The black sheep cares not, however, as it is confident in who it has been made to be. The real question is, are you?
The Process
Concept
First, I used Affinity to make a moodboard to gain references from, along with sketch the initial concepts for the sheep.
Block-Out
I then went into Blender 4.5, where I made a rough draft for the layout.
Sculpting & Rigging
I then sculpted the sheep, retopologized it, and rigged it.
Texturing and Fur
After rigging, I went into Adobe Substance Painter to texture both the black and the white sheep, then exported the texture maps accordingly.
I then went back into Blender where I applied the textures and began to work on the fur.
Finalizing
After messing around with the fur and finding what suited my needs best, I then went back to my rough draft scene and began to implement lighting, grass, foliage, clouds, atmospheric fog, and textures to the landscape and rocks. I then imported the sheep rigs into the scene, placed them accordingly, and posed them as I desired. I groomed their hair to make them look a little more unique to each other, added some trees to fill in some blank space, then rendered the scene with Cycles. Once it was completely rendered, I brought the image into Affinity, where I added some color adjustments, denoised the image overall, and added some subtle godrays to add a touch of warmth and life to the scene.
Everything in this scene was made myself by modeling and using the plugins I have installed (like the rocks and the landscape). The only outside assets used were the trees in the background and the few bushes/shrubbery in front of the rocks, all coming from Polyhaven.com.
The Result
While I was not one of the 5 winners, I was awarded with a finalist position (1 of 16 out of 118), which puts my entry somewhere in the top 13% of this competition.
Overall I am satisfied with how this turned out, and had a blast creating it.
This project was filled with tons - and I mean TONS - of learning. There were multiple firsts within this project that helped me to broaden my skillset and become more comfortable with the tools I used. (Rigging a character from basically one mesh and messing with hair particles were just a couple, to name a few)
If you want to see how I did everything, I made a timelapse video to show my process during the project, so check that out as well!
If you want to check out the actual entry on the Rookies Website, click the button below!