ART DECO LAMP

Inspired by the elegant geometry of Max Le Verrier’s Art Deco designs, I recreated one of his lamps as a detailed 3D model. The project focuses on capturing the balance of sculptural form, metallic texture, and soft illumination characteristic of the 1930s aesthetic. Through this work, I aimed to refine my anatomical sculpting skills and explore ways to optimize my workflow (went fully kinda "procedural" in terms of file-management, by keeping file names organized I saved time on manual reloading model's iterations)

After gathering references, I always start by breaking the model down into its key components. I create a blockout using basic primitives to get a sense of the proportions and overall volume. Then, these primitives evolve into a base mesh ready for further detailing in ZBrush. Below is my ref board:

High-poly pass in ZBrush was quite fun — I had to pose the model correctly to match the reference while also keeping anatomical accuracy in mind. I also assigned four polygroups to correspond with four different materials, but in the end, only used one of them (the sticker's one) to drive an ID mask in Substance Painter to make it easier to separate the sticker from the base of the model for texturing.

After finishing the high-poly model, the low-poly version was made using the original blockout. I wanted to preserve the model’s edge flow and body curvature, so I concentrated more polygons on the body itself. The remaining parts — mostly simple primitives like cylinders and spheres — required less density.

The model was unwrapped with consistent texel density in mind, ensuring each part of the model occupied an equal share of UV space. There was also the option to combine the model’s logical parts into groups like arms, legs, etc., to save UV space. However, that would have reduced texture variety, so I opted to keep them separate as usual.

The texture maps were baked in Marmoset Toolbag and then used in Substance Painter for the texturing process (fell in love with the pearl-like effect achieved on the glass).

Final topology (~30k tris)

Here you can see the model and textured details up close