Getting Started

Don Quixote is a well known character who has been represented by many artists throughout the centuries. One day I saw a statue of Don Quixote and since I've never seen a CG representation of it, I've decided to give it a try. I was inspired by an antique Spanish statue that has very strong lines in its form. I had no concept art or whatsoever, but I used photos and old paintings found in the internet as some reference stuff.

Modelling

For the modeling part, I used the "poly by poly" technique. It is a well know technique and there are a lot of tutorials of how can you do it, so I will just show wires of the final model. The whole model was built that way.


With the model almost finished, I created a very simple rig to pose my character. After that, I exported the model to Mudbox in order to add more details like wrinkles and skin folds. I also enhanced the bone structure a little bit. It is good to remember that I UVW Unwrapped all the models in 3ds max before I exported it to Mudbox. That's because the software keeps the mapping information of the original mesh and I will import the high poly back to Max later. It's a lot easier to unwrap a low poly model than the final mesh. When I finished refining it in Mudbox, I imported the high poly mesh back to 3ds max.


I unwrapped all the parts of the model separately and almost all of them have an unique texture. For the armor I used the same material setup but changing the map.


Maps used to texture it:



Here are the parameters that I used on the shader of the skin:



And the maps

Hair

I used 3dsmax native Hair and Fur for the hair. I duplicated the head mesh and deleted some faces in order to isolate a small portion of the skull which would be used as the emitter for the hair. Then I used Vertex Paint to paint out a mask that would tell the software where the thin hair would "grow”.


Not to slow down my render too much, I did the hair in a separate max file and rendered it using the default Scanline renderer. In order to make a perfect match between the Mental Ray rendered body and my Scanline rendered hair for post production, I merged the final head mesh to the hair file and used the Matte/Shadow material. This way the hair strands occluded by the head shape wouldn't be rendered.