Making of : Balloons Series

Armed with just a mobile phone, Thorsten took a series of snaps which he overlapped with the CGI elements. As common with spontaneous and wholly improvised projects, this “spin-off” raised unpredictable challenges – the biggest of which was the image of the balloon stranded on overhead electrical wires. Direct reference images were understandably quite scarce, and working out exactly how the balloon’s canopy would fold and twist in this scenario was an unsurprisingly tricky task.

Inez sculpted the stranded balloon entirely in Zbrush, based on only a couple of photos – a daunting method, but one which offered her a lot of flexibility and complete control over both the large shapes, and the small detail. Mari was used for texture-painting before returning to Zbrush for final adjustments.

The balloon’s basket and electrical cables were considerably less complicated, and needed only 3dsMax and Photoshop for all modelling and texturing. The final image was rendered in Vred and handed over to Thorsten for the final comp in Photoshop. And below is how he did it: