Boots:
Texturing for the boots was done entirely with the polypaint technique in ZBrush, without using any base textures. You can see the material in Fig.09.


Here I will show you – in images – how I textured the parts of the scenery:

Wooden boards for the deck & railings:
The material can be seen in Fig.10.

The composition of the textures for the material maps can be seen in Fig.10a.



Rope Ladders & Ropes:
A "tileable" texture of rope was created from a 3D rope model render and modified in Photoshop. The material can be seen in Fig.11.


Metal Rings:
A procedural material was created for black metal. The material can be seen in Fig.12.


The blue cloudy sky with stars, which was used as an environment map and rendered background, was painted in Photoshop (Fig.13).

Render & Post Production

The scene was rendered with the Mental Ray renderer and a basic illumination system (not realistic) which highlights the figure of the character without taking away the importance of the scenery. Basically, I used different lights in order to fill the scene, such as area lights, a key light, some extra lights to control the reflection of some objects, such as the eyes, and an HDRI environment system.

This was a personal work, so I didn't separate the background scenery and all the different render elements for post-production. Moreover, I made an Ambient Occlusion pass (AO) and ZDepth (DOF) for the depth of field effect. I adjusted the post-production directly in the final image and used layers of AO, DOF, colour correction, levels adjustments, glows drawn in the metals areas, and reflected light (Fig.14).


I hope you have enjoyed this article.