Concept

When the humans finish their work and leave their offices, these isomorphic special characters rise from the 2D paper world to live in the 3D world, where they try to build their own world and generate new people to live amongst them. I was inspired by my childhood when I was at school and I used to cut characters from paper.

References

I searched a lot for reference images on the web before starting this project. There are many good sites for this – the best one I have ever seen is www.flickr.com, which is a really excellent resource for millions of images!

Modelling

The models in this image are not special and not too complicated, just simple polygonal geometry. Here are some of the wireframes (Fig.01).

Characters & Poses

The most special thing in modelling is the characters. I modelled this image without any references; I simply drew some polygons and moved some vertices. With regards to the poses, these were achieved by attaching a biped to every character (Fig.02).

Modelling Tips

Make your models with as few polygons as you can to conserve the memory and the scene file (Fig.03).

When you intend to model things, always try to collect plenty of images to reach a perfect level of similarity – if that's what you're looking for, of course.

Try to learn different skills, such as rigging, particles, scripting, and any others that will help you in the modelling process.

If you don't have reference images or blueprints for any of the objects you're modelling, try to draw them by yourself with splines or drawing software, such as AutoCAD.

Texturing

I tend to un-wrap the models, especially complicated ones. I then go into Photoshop to draw them by applying an unwrap modifier, which I find to be a good solution for me for simple models. When the models are more complicated I use UVW unwrapping software like Unfold3D, which is quick and easy (Fig.04).

For the characters I used an opacity map that I painted in Photoshop to give random effects to the edges.

Texturing Tips

Apply unwrap modifier on deformable objects before deforming them to keep the right UVW coordinates after deforming.

Using the "Composite” map is very useful in separating colours and blending layers by masks.

Shading

I used Mental Ray for rendering which really is a very good render engine and has some helpful materials and shaders (Fig.05 – 06).

Arch+design material is an excellent material which I used a lot in this work, as well as pro-material – a new material category in Max 2009.