Piedra del Sol
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Shelby Bly explores the sacred Mayan cave looking for artifacts but finds more than she anticipated as her flashlight pierces the darkness.
Date Finalized: October 16, 2016
I first created an artwork with this title and general scene back in 2011 or 2012. The original looked quite flat; like Shelby was a 3D character pasted onto a 2D background rather than one completely rendered 3D scene. That was my biggest challenge, creating a full and coherent scene without losing the piece’s main concepts (promotional artwork for the Shelby Bly Project meaning Shelby needed to be plainly visible and the sun rays filtering down into a cavern on the Sun Stone). I finally fixed the problem by keeping the scene mostly the same while moving Shelby back and adding the new element of the flashlight along with several other small details. The original textures for this cavern were too low-res for rendering in the size I create for high quality prints. I replaced the low-res texture with materials from Terradome 2 then edited all of the other set and prop materials to match the new ground textures. This took a lot of time to figure out and then to render but it was well worth it.