Patreon Peeks 25: Mario Circuit Props! (Patreon)

Hello! I've been on a bit of a Mario Kart kick since last month's arrangement, and so this week I published a little jam session riffing on Mario Circuit, from the original Super Mario Kart. You can listen here: https://youtu.be/ciDn4gOY4EM

I got some positive feedback on the background image here, so I thought I'd go into a little detail about creating it!

I was inspired by Walter Wick, the American artist and photographer behind the famous I Spy books, known for creating complex collages of small props to create a vastly explorable composition. And if/when I make more of these impromptu jam session videos, I'll probably follow the same inspiration! But this image was a fair bit simpler, since the intent isn't to play I Spy:

I created it by modeling several familiar Mario Circuit props in Blender, based on various iterations of the Mario Circuit course that uses this music. Two pipes, five coins, four wall blocks in various colors, two curved curb markers, a chevron sign, and two models of Mario Circuit 1 and Mario Circuit 2. Here they are all laid out:

While you can lay them out however you wish in 3D space, it was important to treat them like real objects being photographed. So, a couple details:

All the materials are procedural and pretty simple, but shiny surfaces have a tiny bit of noise dictating how rough their shine is. Helps light interact more naturally and less sterilely with these otherwise simple shapes. For instance, here's a really close zoom in on the pipe material:

The same goes for the 100% metallic surfaces: the racetracks. I've used little modeling kits before that construct some object from a perforated sheet of tiny metal parts, and I wanted to emulate that look in these miniature racecourses. So I made a material with a stripe texture that changes the material's roughness, making it look laser-etched. The stripes only go on the straightaways that had stripes in the original course!

And finally, all these objects are arranged in a vibrant manner in front of a big white matte sheet, as though in a photo studio. With some neutral HDR lighting (an image of a scan room) and Blender's low-contrast Filmic color grading, these objects become pretty plausible, I'd say! But they still have that impossibly exploded arrangement that Walter Wick achieves in his scenes. Here's the scene from the side:

Perhaps it's a lot of detail over a rather trivial image, but I hope these are some insightful details! They'll certainly help me out when it comes time for another tiny jam session! Please ask some followup questions if you have any, I'm happy to answer in the replies!