Texturing

Texturing the model was pretty simple and it was done in Mudbox. I started baking an occlusion map for each object. For the body I used the map to get some color variation in the skin then I painted the eyebrows, lips and eyelids (Fig.14). As for the cloth I used a tiled texture with a subtle floral pattern, previously flattening the object to UV space which is a real time-saver when painting with tiled textures (Fig.15). I did some tests using a painted hair texture, but the result was a bit noisy for my taste. It didn't look bad, but it was taking too much attention away from the main character and her belly, which was the main focus point. So in the end I went for a flat color. As for colors I chose a pink and blue palette; not only does it resemble the girl and boy colors we are all used to, but also the purple tones I obtained with both colors were great for the quiet atmosphere I was looking for (Fig.16).

Lighting and Shading

I had to decimate the amount of polygons to render inside Maya. It wasn't that much and since the final sculpture didn't have fine details all the main shapes and details were retained. The main focus of the whole image was the girl's belly, so the first light I used was a Spot light pointing from the upper left corner. I gave it a big radius and penumbra to get soft raytraced shadows and a nice falloff respectively (Fig.17). I complemented the light setup with a few more lights, one front Area light with a low value to get all the main volumes of the character and another one as back light to enhance the silhouette (Fig.18). The last light was a Point light right over the belly to get more light bounce to the face, which wasn't enough with my indirect light settings. It also simulates the light emanating from the belly (Fig.19). All lights used a quadratic decay and raytraced shadows (Fig.20). For the skin I used the misss_fast_skin material. I had to create some extra control maps for the scattering layers as well as for the specularity and reflection. The clothes use an anisotropic material and the rest of the materials were all created using a Blinn shader (Fig.21). I rendered the final image at 4000 x 6400 px using mental ray with Final Gather.