3d art

Step by step: Texture
and light a beautiful girl
Girl in Church 2010
Aiming to create a sense of tranquillity, this
image features a pretty girl inside a church
Satoshi Ueda specialises in game graphics and concept art
The main tool used to model
and build this scene was 3ds
Max and it was rendered in
the standard mental ray. Photoshop
was used for a final composite of the
various render layers. The most
difficult aspect of the image was the
rendering time. Even though the image
used the standard Hair and Fur
options, it took a frighteningly long
time to render the hi-res version – two
whole days. In this tutorial we will
discuss the volumetric lighting for the
background, and the materials and
textures used for the girl. The aim of
the image was to produce a moviequality
scene with a sense of serenity.
Concepts
Inspiration behind the scene
76 ●
In terms of modelling the figure, the idea
01 was to create a sense of innocence. I carefully
balanced the position of the eyes, nose and mouth to
make her as attractive as possible. There was a
tendency to go over the top and give her more animestyle
features, but I didn’t want the image to become
unreal. So, I’ve enlarged the eyes as much as possible,
because that’s the main focal point, but not overdone
them. As the overall theme is one of purity, the girl’s
make-up has been kept to a minimum.
I did practice render passes with mental
02 ray and the standard Hair and Fur options
in 3ds Max just to see how well they performed.
The challenge was to create really long hair that fell
naturally. The hair itself was made from splines so
that adjusting the hairstyle was relatively easy.
To make streams of light work, a dim church
03 setting was chosen for a background. This
choice also affects the lighting because the only source of
light comes from the window. The result is a stream of
volumetric light positioned behind the girl, which just
illuminates her face.