The Discovery of Laocoön

The story of Laocoön was the subject of a tragedy by Sophocles. Laocoön was a Trojan priest of Poseidon who, after attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse, was subsequently subject to divine execution (along with his two sons) by serpents sent to Troy across the sea from the island of Tenedos.

The figures are close to life-size (the group is a little over 6 ft 7 in in height) showing the Trojan priest Laocoön, and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, being attacked by the sea serpents. Pliny the Elder attributed the work to three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus.

In 1506 the statue was discovered in the vineyard of Felice De Fredis on the Oppian Hill in Rome. Whilst this surely involved more excavation than my image shows, I found it fascinating that such a great statue could be lost for so many centuries. With that in mind I decided to attempt my own version of the discovery of Laocoön (with plenty of artistic license!). This took a lot longer than I originally anticipated and owe many thanks to the numerous people who helped me with all the problems I encountered. Without that help I would never have seen this to the end - thank you all!

Also, thanks to the very helpful people at GarageFarm.NET that helped me get a full res render! Thanks also to equally helpful and fast RenderStreet for the volumetric pass. Both highly recommended!

The Discovery of Laocoön:
(click image for full size)

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I think this is a great job! I love the lighting!

Simply amazing.

Simply amazing. I want to do something like this. Thanks for sharing. Was this modeled in blender with cycles?

5 stars for me, outstanding work of yours :slight_smile: .

Just great!

matt, wow, i am speechless! that is simply amazing, i bow my head :slight_smile: 5 stars from me, i would give more if they would let me…

not only sculpted you a piece that is in anatomy and pose so difficult (that i had it in mind frequently too, but did not dare even), but you created a presentation that tells a story how this lost statue was found. wonderful! the lightning is great and gives mood, the vegetation and collumns create a perfect composition. i am floored. best work i have seen here on ba forum ever! also the portraits are wonderful, the portrait work on the right son, i like in particular!

and, you should have stated in thick letters, that you did all that on a weak airbook!!! yes, i sculpted on an airbook too, i know the limitations, it is not a 3d machine at all, but you handled these limitations greatly. its not the tools its the dedication, that makes the artist :slight_smile:

now, i have lots of questions :slight_smile:

can we see closeup pics, please? how did you create the statue? dynatopo sculpting each, laokoon and the sons, and then multires etc? or did you begin with basemeshes, posed them and sculpted over in dynatopo? or something else? the serpents, how did you start them? is the marble a hand painted texture with sss shader? the lightning, is it supported by an hdri, and which kind of lights did you use? did you render the lights in passes and composed, or as one render? so curious, i hope you find time to enlighten us, as how you create this big work :slight_smile:

congratulations, matt! great work, very inspiring, too!!

Saw this over in the dynotop thread, so had to come over here and give this a big thumbs up. 5 stars from me.

That’s so good it’s top row candidate for sure !

WOW! Thats amazing! 5 stars from me. :smiley:

top notch. Truly awesome technical and artistically speaking. Congratulations!

@irishrose, thanks! I will post a bit about the lighting soon - that was one of the important things to get right for me. It’s not actually physically exact, but I wanted to approach it like I was painting i.e. I was concerned more with whether it was appropriate for the composition. Some artistic license was definitely used in that sense.

@Elonius, thank you! This was all built in Blender 2.69.1 (using the latest from Buildbot for the volumetrics), rendered in Cycles.

@SumoLond, thank you very much! Looks like I got my first 5 star with this :slight_smile:

@ntnsftr, thanks :slight_smile:

@Ryeath, thanks!

@Sanctuary, thank you very much! I can only hope! :wink:

@Blendermann, thanks!

@meschoyez, very happy to hear that you like the artistic side of it too. I wanted to approach this project as I would if I were painting it; by that I mean that I did not want it to be a modelling tech demo, but instead it I tried to make it about the finished piece of work as a coherent whole that could stand on it’s own regardless of the mode of production. I spent a lot of time on the composition and lighting to try and get the effect that I wanted (still not totally happy, but got fairly close before my Macbook Air decided that it could no longer handle the scene haha).

*5 for sculpture +*5 for the whole scene.
Congratulations

Doris, thank you so much for your very kind words! It is very much appreciated, and especially so since I look up to your art so much. I started sculpting because I found your work through the FXR’s Viggo thread, where you helped him and others so much, so it is not an exaggeration to say that without your influence I wouldn’t even be using Blender right now! :slight_smile:

I’m very glad that you see the composition in the vegatation and columns, I tried to make everything have a purpose in the overall composition. I really tried to avoid adding things without reason. This was tricky to keep a rein on because I was really learning Blender at the same time, so the tempation to overdo something new that I had learned was quite strong. I had to keep reminding myself, “I’m learning how to do ‘x’ because I just want to do ‘y’ and nothing more.” I was attempting to make the background harmonious with the sculpture (since I didn’t really have too much control over the sculpture itself if I wanted it to look something like the real one). I wonder which aspects of this are obvious and which are subtle but supportive of composition, and which are innapropriate. I will sketch some of my ideas onto a picture later. I hope you like my mirroring of the theme by having the entire statue being entangled by its own serpents in the form of the vines growing over the pedestal :slight_smile:

Yes, it was all on a Macbook Air, haha! It was fine at first, but I definitely hit a wall…that put a significant dent in my progress speed :frowning: At the end it was taking about a minute to refresh the compositor with every single change, and the viewport was a nightmare…let’s not get started on render times lol.

Ok, the questions! Yes, I will provide some close ups. I could provide some other angles…but to be honest it is modelled to work with this perspective only. I did not sculpt the backside of the statues because that was never going to be visible according to my intending composition. In fact, Thymbraeus only has half a head, the other side is almost completely smooth! Antiphantes looks particularly bad from other angles, I couldn’t get it right at all, but given that I knew what my goal was I had to tell myself that achieving a great 3D sculpt from all angles was not actually condusive to my achieving that.

Laocoon, Thymbraeus and Antiphantes were posed base meshes and are all dyntopo. I could (or should) have gone to multires with bump maps, but the box mapping was actually proving to be quite nice, so I did not need to UV unwrap. The hair on the 3 statues, and Laocoon’s beard were all done using techniques you described to me :slight_smile: The base mesh for the serpents were created from Bezier curves with a circle as the profile, and another bezier as the taper (so you get a long tube that can be posed, and thickness adjusted as required). These were then sculpted with dyntopo to get the ridges that spiral along the snake as it twist and turns. The cloth base mesh was created with the cloth simulated and then tweaked with proprortional editing and some sculpting.

The marble material is the result of testing out numerous marble materials that you, Michalis, and a few others have posted in various places on this forum, and then adjusting and tweaking for me needs. The marble is from CG textures, the cracks are a texture that I bought (first time I’ve felt the need to do that! I didn’t want to spend ages drawing my own, and the free ones were not quite working), and the grime is from CG textures decal section. I will post my nodes when I am back on the Mac. Essentially I have the diffuse consisting of the marble texture and a small multiplication of the cracks (to darken them), this is then mixed with SSS and a small amount of translucency. Gloss is added such that the cracks are diffuse, clean marble is a little reflective, and wet grime is more reflective. All controlled by fresnel.

The lighting is all mesh lights and spot lamps, no environment lighting. It is rather an elaborate set up to achieve what I wanted. It’s actually rather unrealistic, but I just wanted the image to be an aesthically pleasing, albeit an an aesthically pleasing lie! As long as it was not so unphysical that it detached the viewer from the image and made them think about how the lighting didn’t look quite “real”. I will post some pics of the set up soon.

There are 4 render layers:

  1. All the objects (sculptures, vegeation etc) lit by the lighting rig on layer 2
  2. The volumetric lighting on layer 3 that is affected by the existence of the objects in pass 1, and also a mesh near the light source that is supposed to create some striations in the light. However, the striations were lost at the higher sample count - I didn’t realise this until it was too late. Shame since these were part of the composition too. The cone of light was supposed to have two slightly shadowed sections that fell between the Laocoon and his two sons, so that they each had a spot light of sorts. I will post a pic soon.
  3. Dust - fairly subtle, but it’s visible in the beam of light if you look closely. This is just a bit box of particles using a group of dust objects I created. Same lighting as the volumetric pass, but composited seperately to give me more control.
  4. Mist - the mist was a smoke sim in Blender Internal. the result was similar to the volumetric pass in cycles in that the scene objects obscured the mist, but were not rendered themselves. That seemed like the best way to composite it in to me anyway. I’m sure there were better ways though.

Thanks again! Very happy that you like it :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

More info to come!

Thank you very much Michalis :slight_smile: Very happy that you like it :slight_smile: After I first discovered sculpting through Doris (helping FXR on Viggo, which wasn’t actually a sculpt), I quickly found your work too and it has been a very big inspiration to me. I think that without one, or both of you, I would likely not be sculpting at all. Add to that all the help that you have both given me, so there is a great deal of credit that has to go to you guys.

Oh, and a cookie to whoever can spot my initials carved into an object in the scene :wink: You will have to look at the enlarged version to see it…

Very right column, at the bottom?

you are very welcome, matt, it was always my pleasure to help you, and i am very very happy you could achieve your great goal! :slight_smile:

yes, i noticed and love the mirroring of the theme :slight_smile: … oh, yes, this is like it was on my macbookair too, glad you were patient enough to deal with the long waiting times… well, to be honest, some of my sculptures that were intended to be viewed only on one angle are also sculpted just this angle…lol, i think, it is good practice, since it saves time for the important things that will be seen :slight_smile: … i see, i need to learn about bezier curves, it is amazing how few things i know about blender. great way to get a basemesh of such type it seems. thanks for all the info matt, i am looking forward to the more you announced :wink: thanks for sharing, it is very useful to learn how you approached such a big project.

yup, the cookie is at the column far right…

edit forgot to ask… lol…how did you make the spider web?

Correct :slight_smile:

My patience with the Macbook started to wear thin…I am thinking about building a desktop specifically for this purpose…just need to justify it now haha http://yoursmiles.org/msmile/think/m1703.gif

Glad to hear I am not the only one who sculpts from one angle when it is appropriate. I used three windows to do it, one that I moved around freely, one that was locked to camera view so I could see the effect that it would have on the render perspective, and one which showed my current reference pic. Seemed to work quite well for my purpose, but I think some perspective based bias may exist which makes the sculpt look a little odd from unintended viewing angles.

Yep, the snake base mesh was one of the most effective shortcuts. In fact, the base mesh was almost exactly the same as the sculpted one because the beziers game so much control. After applying the modifiers, the ridges were pretty quite to sculpt on (inverted crease brush with a bit of clay strip where +/- volume or change in shape was needed). I may have gone a little far with the ridges though because I toned down the SSS fairly late on in the sculpting process because my lighting wasn’t finished…the changes made it obvious that I had overdone the SSS. That was a good lesson for me, the material that I am trying to “sculpt” really affects how I need to sculpt it in order to get the result I want, and the lighting really affects how that material appears (obviously). I recall Michalis saying that to sculpt with real marble you have to carve really deeply in order to get the details to stand out…it turns out that it is very similar when working with a modelled version. Going back to material and lighting before sculpting in details would have saved me time, and maybe yielded a better result.

Spider web is a photo, with contrast adjustment, colour to alpha to remove the background, hand painted web to fix gaps and create connection that need to be made to make it fit with the objects in the scene. It actually came out a bit too bright for my liking, I had to do a bit of hand painting over it to subdue it a little. Speaking of hand painting, I will post the unedited version too so you can see what was required - there were some things that I could not easily fix with the already complex lighting rig, better to rectify on the final image.