Rigging

The rigging was done by my friend Alex Angelis. Before he began I showed him some rigging references by Alan Camilo (an amazing animator and rigger). This formed our starting point and once we had discussed what we both thought about how it should be done we were confident we could come up with something approaching a professional quality. Despite doing things quickly, he made and remade several parts and worked tirelessly until the best result was achieved.

Lighting and Rendering

As I mentioned before I used Mental Ray to render the scene. There are about twelve photometric lights in my scene, consisting of two main light sources; yellow being the main light and another blue light providing the rim lighting. All the remaining lights work as fill lights and light bounces. To help the light bounce I used Final Gather with a low preset (Fig.09 – 10).

Compositing

The final image was rendered at 4500 pixels wide and took about ten hours to complete on an Intel I7 950. I rendered three passes; a beauty pass, a hair pass (to speed up the final render I separated the hair pass) and a Z-depth pass. The Z-depth pass was used to create the Lens Blur using the amazing Lenscare plug-in for After Effects (Fig.11). For the color corrections I used Curves and Photoshop gradient maps. Lightroom was used to add grain, vignetting and subtle Chromatic Aberration.

Conclusion

This project took me a long time to do, but provided me with an opportunity to grow as an artist and to develop my perception and skills in both artistic and technical direction. Sometimes it is hard to manage my free time to complete a project, but it is definitely worthwhile. I'm really happy with the final result and with the opportunities this character presented to my professional career (especially this one in Digital Art Masters!). I would like to say thanks to my family, girlfriend and friends who supported me during this project.