The ‘Italian Food Shop' artwork came about from the concept of videogames carrying out Italian cooking, and the project was realised in 3ds Max.

First of all I created the food shop, shelves, refrigeration counter and the other different objects in the scene. I then modelled the boxes, bottles, sausages and the different kinds of cheese (Fig.01).


Most of the textures were created in Photoshop and with Illustrator – here are some examples (Fig.02).


In Fig.03, I have detailed a close-up of the basket of vegetables that the shopkeeper holds in his hands.


I then started work on creating the shopkeeper, whose character was designed by Mauro Baldissera (www.maurobaldissera.it) (Fig.04). I used the biped of Character Studio for the rigging and skinning phases (Fig.05). I then unwrapped the high poly model, and here you can see the process of creation of a physically correct skin texture with a sub surface scattering effect (Fig.06 – 07).






Fig. 08 details the distribution map of the beard, eyebrows and hair, which was based on the face's UV.


Fig.09 – 12 show all of the passes which were used to create the shopkeeper's clothing. Normal maps were created in ZBrush, and the jeans and shoes were created by combining photographs on the UV layout.