Making Of 'Evasion'

Note: This Making Of has models containing nudity

Introduction

Hello, my name's Sébastien Rousseau and I'm currently a senior shader artist at Eidos Montreal. In this Making Of I'm going to show you my creative process behind this image.

The main goal of this 3D illustration was to add human emotion and figuration to my personal portfolio and also learn some anatomical notions.

Before the creation of this illustration I passed through many steps. One of these steps was to create from a generic 3D human from. As you can see in Fig.01 - 02, this human character was modeled in 3ds Max for the basic shape with a reference sheet. After that it was exported to ZBrush for high res sculpting.

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Fig. 02

Fig. 02

The best learning path is gathering as many references, tutorials and books on the topic as you can, otherwise you run the risk of creating a human shape just based on a preconceived picture in your head, which might well be wrong.

For the texturing, I used ZBrush's Zapplinks jointly with Photoshop, along with a lot of reference pictures from 3d.sk.

Fig.03 shows a ZBrush Transpose tool test I did halfway through creating the base mesh.

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

Fig.04 - 05 show the final mesh rendered in Octane Render.

Fig. 04

Fig. 04

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

Personal Art Process

The inspiration for this image was a speed painting I'd done a long time ago (Fig.06). I really liked the way that the neck is broken and the body moving forward, so I decided to make this painting the foundation for "Evasion".

Fig. 06

Fig. 06



Each time I finish a certain amount of work, I really like to move some distance away from the technical parts and do a paintover to re-challenge the art direction. With this technique the illustration can evolve and new ideas can emerge.

In Fig.07 you can see that I did a paintover with a WIP character version and then quickly created the art direction for the background.

Fig. 07

Fig. 07

When the character and background were almost finished I considered the picture too much of a "zombie" picture and therefore, with a paintover, the idea of monster squid tentacle emerged (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Finally, as you can see in Fig.09, the final render was much too artificial for me and I decided to paint on top of the render until I reach the right balance in color and details (Fig.10 - 11).

Fig. 09

Fig. 09

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Character Modeling

I started to pose the character in ZBrush with the Transpose tool so that it fitted the initial concept.
Fig.12 - 13 shows you a time-lapse of the modeling progress in ZBrush from the start to the final pose.

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

When you're working on characters, if you know a 2D/3D character artist, then I'd advise asking their opinion about your WIP modeling. It's very important to get feedback because your self-evaluation can become blinded to minor anatomical mistake after having worked for such a long period of time on your asset. This recommendation is valid for all the creative process steps.

One important thing to keep in mind when you're posing your character is to rethink the musculature and find the anatomical landmark. If not, the model will look unnatural.

When this process was finished I reduced the subdivision level to reach approximately 300k poly and I exported this level in obj. format with UV space. Then I increased to the last subdivision level and exported it without UV space (memory optimization). So, with Xnormal, I extracted the normal map and the lost detail from the high res version.

Lighting HDR

There are many excellent ways to make a good lighting setup with mental ray. I've tried a lot of different setups, but in this case I preferred to use image-based lighting (IBL). It produces a low contrast picture that makes texture and modeling look well. You can access a great gallery of HDR pictures here.

Step 1

Make sure you have your gamma correction enabled (Fig.14).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

Step 2

Add a skylight to your scene.

Step 3

Open the Environment dialogue tab and in the Environment Map slot add the HDR file and setup option (Fig.15)

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Step 4

Activate "mr photographic exposure control" (Fig.16).

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

Step 5

Copy an Instance into the Material Editor and in the Map slot of the skylight.

Step 6

In the Material Editor set the mapping to Spherical and set the blur to 0.0 (Fig.17).

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

Step 7

In Indirect illumination, enable Final Gather with one or two bounces (Fig.18).

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

Step 8

If you choose an Arch&Design; material then you can enable Ambient Occlusion.

Step 9

Render (Fig.19 - 20).

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

Step 10

If you want to adjust the exposure, go to the Environment tab and tweak the Exposure value.

Texturing / Shading

In this environment the number of object was pretty low, so, the textures needed to be a lot more detailed to hide the lack of geometry. Each diffuse had its proper normal map and specular map.

I'm not going to spend much on texture creation because 3DTotal already have a lot of great tutorials on this subject. Before creating any texture you absolutely need to fix two things: your camera POV and your render size. With this information you can easily track the right resolution of your textures. This rule will focus your mind to put the right amount of detail in the right places.

My texture sheets can be seen in Fig.21 - 22.

Fig. 21

Fig. 21

Fig. 22

Fig. 22

All the environment materials use an Arch&Design; shader. I highly recommend this shader, which has been part of 3ds Max since the 2006 version. It is really versatile for all kinds of situations. In this case, mostly of the surface shaders used a light blurred reflection to merge them all together.

If you want more information on the Arch&Design; shader you can found a description of all the options available here.

For the character/pants/tentacles I rendered two passes (one with the SSS Fast Skin shader and one with the Arch&Design; shader) and after that I composited them in Photoshop.

I took a screenshot of my water shader) since it was the most complex one (Fig.23). I recommend this excellent tutorial for creating the same kind of material with caustic included: Link 1 I Link 2

Fig. 23

Fig. 23

For the water splash on the wall I used a second UV channel with a black and white mask to modulate the strength of the reflection. I used the composite shader jointly with Arch&Design; for this kind of effect. It's really useful for adding a lot of layering effects to your environment and this blending mode is exactly like Photoshop (Fig.24).

Fig. 24

Fig. 24



And here's the final image (Fig.25).

Fig.25

Thanks for reading. If you have any question about this tutorial you can email them to me.

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