For the debut album by New Zealand psychedelic band, MOSES, I aimed to continue to reflect the surreal nature of their music, whilst paying ode to a key inspiration of mine; Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch’s work fitted neatly with existing Christian iconographic themes I had established in previous MOSES releases; especially evident in his magnum opus, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

To achieve these two objectives, I opted to use various sections (or ‘episodes’) present in the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights as the basis for character composition. The characters present in these episodes were altered substantially to incorporate various photogrammetric scans of shells sourced from Evan’s Bay in Wellington, New Zealand.

The scans used in the artworks for this release were produced using a pipeline which leant on an array of 3D production software. Photo batches were first captured using a turntable, lightbox and DSLR setup before being processed in Agisoft’s Photoscan Pro for point cloud, mesh and texture information. Noise in the resulting meshes was first cleaned in ZBrush before decimation and texture reprojection.

Substance Designer was used create PBR material output based upon the scan texture information. In Substance Designer, the shell materials were also repurposed for character and environment design; creating a cohesive aesthetic throughout the designs. The shell scans, character designs, and environment treatments were all finally brought into Cinema 4D for the majority of the compositing and design workload.

Each of the episodes identified in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights was approached separately; each resolved individually as an artwork for singles from the album. These episodes were later combined to produce the final album artwork.