3d art

Character
Textures and lighting
Getting the right look and feel
After completing all the geometry,
09 the next step was to make clean UV
coordinates. For that task I used the headus
UVLayout application, which is great for making
fast and clean UVs on organic models. This task
is important because texture relies on the model
using these coordinates.
To achieve a realistic kind of look, I planned to use
11 mental ray for rendering, and its great Fast Skin shader.
This shader comes with many slots for textures that need to be
fed in, in order to create real-looking skin; but I decided to use only
the main ones such as overall colour, front and back scatter,
specular and bump.
My goal was to make the monster
10 look more alive. To do so, I used a few
different face photographs and projected them
directly onto the geometry inside ZBrush using
the ZApp Link plug-in. After that, I hand-painted
some missing details in Photoshop. I repeated
the whole process for the clothes.
Biggest challenges
Among all the technical challenges that I came across
in this project, making the facial expression was the most
difficult since I did not do any concepts or previsualisation.
To make this image look realistic I needed
a good understanding of how human skin reacts to light
and to translate this to the mental ray skin material. Also,
different light types react differently with this material and
I recommend area lighting as the best solution. For
creating hair I used the Shave and Haircut plug-in. For
rendering hair I used Maya, which does so really fast.
Basically, I imagine lighting as painting
12 the image with light, so every light in my
scene has some colour and purpose. Most of the
lights in this scene were area lights, because they
can produce very accurate shadows and a soft
feel. Also, area lights react with the specular
component of the Fast Skin material; so the bigger
the light, the wider specular reflections, giving you
great control over the final look of the skin.
45 minutes
render time
Resolution:
3,000 x 3,000
After numerous
13 render tests, I
rendered a few different
passes: main beauty pass,
extra reflection pass and
ambient occlusion. The most
important thing about
compositing different passes is
to understand that everything
that emits or reflects light
should be layered over diffuse
in additive or screen mode; and
passes that subtract light, like
shadows and occlusion, should
be multiplied.
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