Splinterlands Art Contest [Week 179] - Cave of Energy Crystals

I am always fascinated by crystals. I've been seeing crystal a lot in games and in anime. Being beginner 3D modeler, it's only natural that crystals will be one of my todo, or to-model, list. In this post, I will show you how I modeled my crystals. :)

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The Process Flow

My work flow is composed of three main parts: Modeling, Scene Layout and Shading.
My scene, on the other hand, is made up of two main parts, the cave and the crystals.

The Cave

I started with a cylinder for the cave. I rotate it along the x-axis and then scale it to the y axis. To give it more vertices to work on later, I subdivided it and give it a subdivision modifier.

Next, I positioned the camera inside it and then moved some vertices for it to look more like a cave. :)

Finally, I unwrapped it to a rocky texture. Add in the roughness, the height map and displacement map. I also added a displacement modifier to it. Tweaked the nodes until I am satisfied with how it looks.

That will do for the initial look of the cave and the initial position of the camera. I will make adjustments as I move on.

The Crystal

My crystal was inspired by the Splinterlands' Dark Energy Crystal (DEC). I started with a cube and then scaled it to approximate dimensions.

Based on the DEC, I added the necessary loop cuts. After that, I adjusted the vertices as necessary to approximate the shape. Finally, I moved some of the vertices to look like more natural - not symmetric.

My crystal will be made up of two parts, the surface and the core. The surface will have a glass like shading while the core will be the one emitting a certain color.

I choose blue initially as it is the most common color of crystals I see.

The next thing I did was to create a crystal cluster and then distribute it inside the cave.

I duplicated the crystal that I made to make a cluster.

I scaled and rotated the duplicates to make it non-uniform and will look less duplicates.

I then duplicated the cluster and distribute it inside the cave. I don't have an image for it since I forgot to grab one during the process.

The Gemstones

To add more elements inside the cave, I added in gemstones. I added the gemstones with the help of an addon. I just tweaked the settings and adjusted the geometry.

I then made it glow just like the crystals. I used a pinkish color for it. Finally, I distributed it inside the cave using a particle system.

The Final Scene

With the crystals and gems already in the scene, I made some final adjustments. Adjusted the positioning of the camera and made my primary crystal bigger for the sake of the rule-of-thirds. 🙂

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Conclusion

Finally, I managed to create a cave with energy crystals. Although, it took me hours make it, I learned a lot of things in the process which makes it worth it.

I made my other render colored red. I wonder what other people would prefer to be the color of the crystal?

To wrap things up, here is a separate render of the crystals I used in my scene.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.
Hope you like what you find.
Have a great day!

Created with Blender.