Making Of 'Arduous Path'

I didn't start this piece with a sketch or a particularly clear idea. I'd just got this picture in my mind of a cross and the thought that I'd like to add in some kind of "surrealism", inspired by William Blake poetry and work by Kazimir Malevich. Then I saw a girl, walking somewhere in space or on a planet's surface, and the cross. I decided to start with the girl, to paint her in Photoshop and then create the environment with Maya and ZBrush.

In Photoshop I got a simple round brush and started painting a sketch with color (Fig.01 - 05). The image of a black girl began to appear.

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

When I saw that the shape was developing well, I knew where I wanted to add more detail. To do this I created a custom brush, which is something I always do when I'm adding in detail. You can see the details of the brush in Fig.06 - 07. You can experiment with these settings to give a unique texture to each individual material.

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

Here's a really cool way to add real details to a material (Fig.08 - 09).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

Then I changed the color to make it appear colder (Fig.10).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

I continued adding details and also made the skin whiter. For the face I used the Round Fan Stiff Thin Bristles brush, which is a default PS5 brush (Fig.11 - 12).

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

So now the girl looked liked she'd been cut from a framing shot from a sci-fi movie. The next step was the environment. First I made the ground and some crystals in Maya using the Extrude Face option on a polygonal plane. Then I painted it in Photoshop, using a 3D layer. I just dragged and dropped the textures onto the bottom layer (texture source) and then used the Stamp tool to paint the crystal textures (Fig.13).

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Here's what I got (Fig.14).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

I rendered the objects in Maya and used mental ray for the lighting. To create realistic sunlight I just pushed one button in the mental ray Render settings and turned the light source to point where it was needed in the picture (Fig.15).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

To create the cross I extruded faces from a cube and then just smoothed it. I made the land and castle in the background in ZBrush, then imported them into Maya and rendered without texture (Fig.16 - 17).

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

For the crystals around the cross, I added an icy material using mia_material_x from the mental ray shaders. I chose Frosted Glass (Fig.18).

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

I added a color texture of the ice to this shader and also made a normal map of this in CrazyBump and added it to the shader (Fig.19).

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

I also changed the bump attributes to "Tanget Space Normals" (Fig.20).

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

Here are the layers I ended up with (I rendered each layer separately) (Fig.21 - 24).

Fig. 21

Fig. 21

Fig. 22

Fig. 22

Fig. 23

Fig. 23

Fig. 24

Fig. 24

I needed a foreground layer for my character and I made it in Maya in the same way as I'd make the background. Here is the result (Fig.25).

Fig. 25

Fig. 25

I composited these layers together with my character in Photoshop and started adding some textures and brushstrokes to give me image more detail and atmosphere. I also added more rocks to the background and some additional light rays going through the cross (for which I used the Dual brush)(Fig.26).

Fig. 26

Fig. 26

And here's the final image (Fig.27).

Fig. 27_final_small

Fig. 27_final_small

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