Compositing

So for the layout with some views of the character, I used passes such as a beauty pass, the shadow cast from the key light, an Ambient Occlusion pass (from Mental Ray), as well as some graphics, like the background and the lines and logos on the side of the layout.  I also did some colour correction and tweaked the key light a little (duplicating the beauty pass layer in Colour Dodge blend mode at 20% opacity – just to burn it a little, like a Polaroid picture or something!).  Here are some images (Fig13 – 14).

Background:


Character:

Environment Development

Modelling
For the modelling, my mood was to create a dirty urban ambience, like Chernobyl, and an underground urban environment.  So creating a half-pipe ramp was the starting point, and then the other objects came out naturally during the 3D composition process.  Again, I was always working with low-poly geometry, so I was only using low cache.  Here are some wire frames (Fig15 – 16).




Light Rig
For the lighting of the environment I used two lights: one direct light as a key light and one VRay light as a rim light. With the direct light I used a projection map with some silhouettes of trees on it, to create an optical illusion of a projected shadow cast from some pseudo-trees behind the camera.  Here's a picture of the light rig (Fig17).