The Spores of Time

I’ve been wanting to do something with mushrooms since a while ago. And since I’ve been making a series of toon-ish 3D renders/illustrations based on plants, I decided the next ones would be with mushrooms.

(for some reason, I’m liking designing alien/fantasy plants a lot!)

I wanted to make a mushroom just a tad different from the usual, so first I designed way more round than the usual ones. It’s almost like a ballon.

But then that wasn’t enough, I needed something to make them different. I thought about layers, multiple caps on the same mushroom, colors, glows, even tentacles. And then one day I was taking a bath and found inspiration on the mos unlikely object: the drainage in the bathtub, which looks something like this:

Yeah, somehow my mind wrap that around a sphere and it made sense.

So I came with the idea of the mushroom developing holes on the sides of it’s cap when it matured to spread the spores (instead of doing it from below).

As for the structures, I had posted about them before. I wanted the mushrooms to be growing in a really unlikely place. So, partially inspired by Mass Effect 2’s start screen, I designed these floating wreckage where the space spores of other mushrooms had landed, making an impossible place for life, possible!

And I guess that’s the message behind this illustration: everything is possible. With time, you’ll find a way.

This one was made with Maya, using polys for the structures, nurbs for the mushrooms (and keeping them like that, no conversion to polys or subdiv), toon shaders here and there, fur for the plants and grass and many different render layers, suing both maya renderer and mental ray. Here are some layers:

Color, Fog, Highlights, Shadows

Hope you like it.