At the end, the monkey himself weighed about 1.8 million polygons (Fig.07).
Fig.07
I didn’t take the traditional approach of making a 3D character. After modelling, I skipped texturing for two reasons: one, I’m not good at texturing and two, unwrapping 1.8 million polygons would have taken too long and I only had two months to work on the piece. So instead, I made three personal metal/bronze shaders for the monkey (Fig.08). Those shaders were procedurally generated, light and camera based. Therefore no texturing or serious unwrapping was required.
Fig.08
I used a total of six shaders, including three metal shaders, two lamberts, and one AO (Fig.09).
Fig.09
The lighting set up was quite easy. In fact, there were only two spotlights simulating the backlight and one directional light simulating the front light. It was kind of like the classic three spotlights rig with a little tweak.
There were six layers to render for each character. Each layer contained one shader and each procedural shader took about nine hours to render (my computer is OLD). My render resolution was 4k by 5k.
I had only two months for the challenge, so I tried to save as much time as possible. Everything except the characters was hand painted or photo edited in Photoshop. It was my first time painting for a final image. I spent a lot of time painting the hot fire in the monkey’s eyes and mouth (Fig.10). I also had some trouble with the background, but eventually pulled it off (Fig.11 & Fig.12).
Fig.10
Fig.11
3DTotal
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Fig.12
I hope you enjoy the image and found this making of useful. Thank you very much (Fig.13).
