Magazine Cover

The objective of this assignment was to create a magazine cover for an (recent) news article we found interesting on the internet. It was required, though, that on top of creating a design for the magazine cover, we were also required to make the 3D Model that the cover would use, relating to its main subject.

Before all that, we had to find two articles and create a few sketches for each of them. We were required to convey the main “point” of the article within our ideas in an exaggerated but easy to understand fashion. For my two articles, I chose a piece about AI companies squeezing the Europe’s power grids, and a piece about certain parts of gaming consoles being scarce, which you can see the sketches for on the bottom; the former being on the left, and the latter being on the right. I was initially aiming for the bottom right design, although, after consideration, I settled on the top left as I believed it conveyed its respective message in a better way.

Next, we had to make a rough composite to get a basic idea of the colors down. This was simple enough, albeit, very crude. I think it got the idea across fine, though. Initially, dark storm clouds and lightning were meant to be stationed above the tower itself, literally showing the action of the grid being squeezed for its energy… this ended up being scrapped as it proved to only clutter up the idea. Besides, creating the model itself would prove to be quite the tedious task anyway.

Before this class, I had never touched a 3D Software for more than 10 minutes- let alone to completely put together an entire model that could be bent and messed around with. Not to mention the fact that I was doing something very tedious, where there weren’t that many corners to be cut. Still, I was able to do a few things to alleviate the work load. For one, most of- if not, the entire build has symmetry generators to mirror each and every little thing across each side. This means that technically, only one leg out of 4 actually “existed” before it was all baked down.

It was honestly sort of fun having to mess around with some of the things I had to in order to get this all to work, especially since it was largely the same solution 75% of the time. The big “plates” on each side of the tower were made into caricatures, as they would have been too complex to fully model out, though. The last thing that gave me any trouble were all the wires, as each one was a spline that I had to manually make sure wrapped around the tower. Believe me, if it weren’t such a time-consuming task, there would have been much more wrapping around.. although I’m happy with where it ended up. Texturing also became a slight hurdle for a bit, but it was overcome with a bit of thinking and searching… and some help. After that, all we had to do was render it in a high quality TIFF, put it into Photoshop to remove the alpha channel, and put it into the rough composite with some edits. The purple color on the original crude image, you’ll notice, ended up being changed to better reflect the warm background… that, and I think it fits much better.

To be honest, for a lot of the time spent working on this, I wasn’t sure if the final product would turn out even half decent… but after all is said and done, I think it looks pretty good, especially for my first time modeling in 3D. I feel like I could have handled lighting a little bit better- mainly trying to make it look more like the main light source is the sun, from behind the object. Along with that, the entire model is probably a mess of polygons, and any reasonable 3D builder would most likely have a heart attack if they took even a closer glance at it all… but it is what it is!