3d art

Character
Finishing the design
Giving the character the Pixar look
My main goal in this image is to work with the skin
09 shader and this is what I dedicate most of my time to.
I’ve discovered from previous projects that there must be wellestablished
lighting before testing the shaders. This is why I build
a rough lighting setup before anything else.
I always thought the lighting of the piece should be subtly
10 contrasted; this way I can get delicate light bouncing in parts
where visual attention is critical. The lighting setup is the basic threepoint
light formula: a light simulating the sun, a Fill light in the left side
and a Back light simulating the reflection off the wall.
3 hours
render time
Resolution:
2,688 x 3,500
After I define the
11 scene’s mood with a
basic lighting setup, I focus on
the skin shader. I use the SSS
Fast Skin shader, which can be
found on Zap Andersson’s
blog (http://mentalraytips.
blogspot.com). This shader
gives you more control over
reflections and also the
material specularity.
When I’m happy with the overall look of the shader, I
12 proceed to texture the most complicated elements of the
scene such as the sweater, the bag and the skirt. This means I can
get a rough idea of how all the elements are working together and
also check if some tweaking is needed in the texture values or the
lighting setup.
Colours and
materials
After I texture the background, I work on the paintbrush in her hand. For this I create a new file so I can
13 control the lighting and rendering parameters properly. The last step is to gather everything in Photoshop in three
layers: the character, the background and the brush. With a few final tweaks, I have the result I want.
The biggest challenge for me in
this image is to achieve the look I
have visualised with the combined
effects of the lighting, skin shader
and the character’s clothes. If we
look at the original concept art,
one of the main characteristics of
the little girl is her multicoloured
sweater. As a result, its modelling
turns out to be a significant
element as I don’t want it to look
too rigid or heavy. This is why I
decide to go to town with the
knitting texture. I achieve this with
a good Bump map and some fine
tweaking in the Diffuse channel.
151