"What is your pleasure sir?"
"The box!" - Hellraiser

For my next experiment with nomad I wanted to try to experiment with lighting.

I wanted to push the lighting and rendering capabilities of nomad just like I'd pushed the textures and painting last time. The aim again being to equal what I could achieve in maya but on the tablet.

As per my last experiment I thought I'd do a simple sculpt. In the last one I had created a dragon scale sphere. So the next  sculpt made sense being a box.

But what to do.

The more I said to myself "I need a box" the more I heard the line from Hellraiser come to haunt me.

Hellraiser, for those of you who haven't seen it, is a great film. It's one of my favourite horrors. And Douglas Bradley gives an amazing performance as the charcter Pinhead with some amazingly terrifying dialogue.

But one of the main characters in the film is the box itself, the gateway to hell. And thats were I decided to go with this sculpt.

I started off with box itself, just a basic cube which I ended up painting with one of my alpha brushes to get a wood effect.

For the gold etching of the lament cube, as its known, I had the perfect reference. The dvd boxset of the first 3 films.

I decided to take a picture and use it as a reference image in nomad. Then on a plain with a high subdivision I used the mask tool to mark the cut out elements.

Next I inverted this mask and used the scale tool to raise the etching further. Finally the trim tool allowed me to cut this to a thin surface. And with the 3 different etchings I resized them over the base cube.

That sounds a lot easier than it was, in truth it was hell!

Next by comparison adding some cubes for walls and the floor was quite simple.

But now for the real challenge, the lighting. In the films when the box is opened a bright blue light shines through any cracks or gaps in the walls. This was the effect I was aiming to recreate.

So I thought "on the film set, they had holes in the wall and big lights shining through". So clearly the simplest and best way to get that effect was to cut holes in my wall and put the light behind.

This would create some cool shadows and some nice highlights. And yes, it does look cool.

A secondary light added a bit more depth to the piece overall as did turning on some of the other render settings such as depth of field and ambient occlusion.

The final result. Well I feel it speaks for itself. And it was my pleasure sir.