Tempest in a Teacup by OberonX

Cinema 4D • Surrealism • posted on Nov 21, 2005

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Description

This bit of whimsy was inspired by the expression "tempest in a teacup," which refers to a great commotion about a trivial event. It originally began as an experiment to create a fairly realistic render of an everyday object (a teacup, in this case), and expanded from there. Everything in this image was modeled in Cinema 4D XL 9.1. With the exception of the wood texture and the HDR image used for reflections, all of the materials are procedural textures of one sort or another. The entire scene is a mere 9800 polys, of which some 7500 constitute the hapless sailor on top of the waterspout. (He's actually Otto, the free human male figure included in C4D.) The hardest part turned out to be making a decent cup of tea. The tea texture went through several evolutions, trying to get the look of a cupful of light tea without milk. Getting the shader to emulate the darkening of the fluid deeper within the cup required quite a bit of experimentation, while still retaining the swirling displacement map for the surface. I'm fairly happy with the final result, though. I considered adding a splatter of droplets around the cup, but I decided to keep things neat and simple in the end, to heighten the contrast between the mundane (the cup, saucer and spoon) and the fantastic (the waterspout, boat and sailor). I hope you enjoy the result ;-)