Making Of 'Prototype A'

Introduction

Hi everyone, I'm Won Gyo Lee and I'm going to show how I created my "Prototype A" image. I'll be focusing on how to make a detailed normal map and I hope you find this article interesting.

Concept

This story for this image is in the near future. A huge international company wants to use soldiers to monopolize special resources, so they create a prototype soldier for war. This character is one of those prototype soldiers.

To start, I gathered together some images to use as references (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Modeling

When modeling, I usually start with creating a whole, rough body, and then I decide to divide the hard surface parts and sculpt parts (Fig.02)

Fig. 02



The next step is making the hard-surface modeling in 3ds Max and sculpting some parts using ZBrush (Fig.03a - 03b).

Fig. 03a

Fig. 03b

I made the sculpt low-poly (approximately 10000 tri) so the character could be used in a game (Fig.04).

Fig. 04_polycount

Fig. 04_polycount

Mapping

I extracted the complete map, occlusion map, diffuse map and normal map by using the Render To Texture function. I then made the textures, but I'm not going to go into detail about that here.

I wanted to make a more detailed normal map, so I used the additional bump option. I put a bump map in this slot and then extracted the "bump-normal map" using low-poly on low-poly (Fig.05).

Fig. 05_texturing

Fig. 05_texturing

If you compare this with the first normal map, you can see that the second normal map includes the bump detail. If you think this process is too complex then you can use a normal filter in Photoshop, but I think this process is much better (Fig.06).

Fig. 06_texture_map

Fig. 06_texture_map

It is important to improve the quality. Here is low poly model that I applied to the final normal map
(Fig.07).

Fig. 07_character_model

Fig. 07_character_model

Lighting & Rendering

I had to do a lot of tests to find the best materials and lighting (Fig.08).

Fig. 08_texturing

Fig. 08_texturing



I want to make a daylight style, so I used mental ray "Daylight". I needed to change an environment option. It took a lot of trial and error but I finally found the best option for my scene. Here's my environment and GI choice (Fig.09).

Fig. 09_rendering_lighting

Fig. 09_rendering_lighting

Lastly, I composited a glow light and changed the color balance in Photoshop (Fig.10).

Fig. 10_composition

Fig. 10_composition

And here's the final image (Fig.11).

Fig. 11

Thanks for reading this Making Of and if you have any questions, please visit my website and send me an email.

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