Recently deadmau5 dropped a single entitled "Suckfest9001" - As usual, this Soundcloud release lacks an album cover; therefore I obviously had to make one to avoid the boring default background of a barely-opaque music note appearing when listening to the song.
I used the backdrop from my really, really old bike tutorial file for this setup:
By pressing 7 on the keyboard, I'm able to see what my spotlight looks like while I'm working on the project without having to render it. I wish I would have realized this earlier into the creation of this file, as I couldn't figure out why only one spotlight worked whenever I had multiple shining onto the mau5head.
Unfortunately, I had to boolean into the head to dig out the eye socket shape. I did my best to not make it look horrible when smoothed. I ended up trying to improve the final render by digitally painting around the eye in photoshop.
What the head looks like from above
I enjoy messing around with the render settings, so I used both Raytrace shadows and Depth Map shadows and compared them.
Depth Map shadows appeared more realistic and showed up in the reflections of the mau5head:
Raytrace shadows definitely had a beautiful, simplified look to them and made the mau5head appear more shiny, but I didn't like how they didn't appear in the reflection. I probably could have fixed this in settings, but I still preferred the Depth map shadows' realistic look.
This is the final product:
Prototypes
Later, over on the deadmau5 subreddit, someone complained that I used a font other than Arial Black for the title. I would love to explain to them that I chose a weaker-looking, breakable font that matched the mood of what is supposed to be a SUCK fest rather than a strong, stable font such as AB, but this is what my first prototype looked like (which happened to use AB anyways):
Here are other fonts I tried before settling on the final
