Knowth Rock Art Exhibition

A recent project that was a lot of fun to put together. The client was looking to create graphics that highlight the carved artwork of the stones seen below. The process was interesting. The stones were recorded in high detail using hand held laser scanners. A massive downside to recording in this format is the lack of usable colour information. As a result, an important step in this project was building new textures in Substance Painter.

Once new textures were built the next phase was creating line art for the carvings. The Ambient Occlusion and Normal maps were used to trace out any details that could be carved artwork. Those drawings were then shown to an archaeologist who clarified what is and isn’t carved artwork, the archaeologist then provided a sequence to display the carvings for each stone.

The sequenced carving maps were used as masks for Self Illumination inputs on VRay materials. The textured stone was rendered with lighting and no self illumination input to use as a base for the graphics. The stones were then rendered unlit, with self illumination input to create accurately mapped alpha channels to use in After Effects to create the animations for the graphics seen below.

I really enjoyed working on these. It was great to combine workflows from several other projects to create a fully realised product. I’m looking forward to seeing them in the actual exhibition space in the upcoming launch of the Rock Art exhibition center.