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).
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).
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).
It is important to improve the quality. Here is low poly model that I applied to the final normal map
(Fig.07).
Lighting & Rendering
I had to do a lot of tests to find the best materials and lighting (Fig.08).
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).
Lastly, I composited a glow light and changed the color balance in Photoshop (Fig.10).
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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