Making of 'Lady of Shalott'

Story, Concept Design & Drawing

In the beginning, I wanted to do a portrait of a young girl, with a sort of love story type background, but then I decided to place her into an environment which better fitted her story. Remembering an oil painting by John William Waterhouse, my favourite Master of art, I wished for my own female character to be in such a beautiful picture. I changed the heroine and the environment of Waterhouse's original painting, and made my character expressive through her body language and her abundant expression. Waterhouse's landscape also includes depth and feeling through its aesthetic appeal, which is a common characteristic in my own works; harmonising characters within their environments. This is why I selected this painting as a reference for my work. I had to consider that some people would think that I had just simply copied the original picture, and so I decided to add my own elements - I was not attempting an exact pixel for pixel copy of the painting. I changed the lighting, perspective and atmosphere of the original, and I spent around one and a half months working on it, through which time I acquired a lot of knowledge about traditional art, 3D, and 2D techniques. In the beginning, it took me some time to decide which software and techniques I should use to get the effects that I intended to achieve. I tried very hard to consider the difficulties that I would face along the way, such as the water's wavy surface, the woods in the background, my character's hair, the lighting, and so on.

Collecting References

After I finished the concept design, I spent a long time collecting various references, such as human anatomy pictures, human skin textures, pictures of boats and clothing, environment textures, and so on. I should certainly thank www.3d.sk and www.human-anatomy-for-artist.com, because almost all of my references were gathered from these resources. I then modified my design again, using the reference materials which I had gathered to inform my work (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Fig. 01

Modelling, Pose & Layout

Moving on to the low-resolution modelling process, my character was modelled in Maya. Firstly, I modelled a standard, human body and spent a lot of time on the topology structure. At this stage I didn't use any reference material; I just let her look like a 'normal' person, then went on to create the teeth, eyes and hair. The eyes are two-layer models; one layer was used to catch the Specular highlight and reflectivity, whilst the other one was used to place the colour textures. I also used NURBS patches to create the hair's initial style. After all the elements were finished, I started to adjust her facial characteristics, making use of some of my reference images and, of course, Waterhouse's original oil painting. I didn't want my role to look too desperate or painful, so you can see the wireframes of the character's head in Fig.02 - 05. You especially need to take care in the places which have been marked with red arrows (Fig.02 - 05).

Fig. 05

Fig. 05

After finishing the character modelling parts I simply bonded the model together, and then placed it in my required pose. I had to consider my model in relationship to the original oil painting. When I achieved a satisfactory pose, I copied a new character model and then hid the original model. The rough, low-resolution model can be seen in (Fig.06).

Fig. 06

Fig. 06

I applied clothing to the body of my model, then modified the topology structure and the appearance of the character, all the while taking into consideration the materials and the gravity of the clothing. I didn't use Maya's cloth system because I wanted more control and freedom over it. I modelled her hands separately, so that I could save more RAM and also so that I could control the hands' shader separately. The long grass in the foreground was modelled by hand, because this was the only way I could achieve a satisfying result. I first modelled various forms of grass, then placed them into my scene and duplicated them to make more. I mainly used the Soft Modification Tool to modify the grass, because this process required more care being taken. The grass and leaves in the foreground can be seen in (Fig.07 - 08).

Fig. 07a

Fig. 07a

Fig. 07b

Fig. 07b

There was nothing special about the other elements in the modelling process. Tip: we can sometimes use texturing instead of modelling, for example on some leaves and grass which can be hard to see. When I finished all of the models, I then needed to carefully place them so that they work well for me (Fig.09).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Re-modelling

After the layout of my models I began the high-resolution modelling process. I adjusted the body's appearance in Mudbox, added more details, and then took it back into Maya. The high-resolution modelling process for the clothing was the same as for the character, however more attention needed to be paid to the creases in the clothing. The hands also required more detail (Fig.10 - 11).

For the other elements, I focused upon creating "imperfect realism" when it came to the prop models and the environment (broken edges, scattered objects, and grass). I paid a lot of attention to placing of my objects, creating depth in the scene, and matching the composition of the original oil painting. The main high-resolution models can be seen in (Fig.12 - 16).

Fig. 10a

Fig. 10a

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

UV's

I set the UV according to the normal method. I prefer to finish all of the UV process in Maya, because Maya's new version contains a powerful UV function. I used Cylindrical Mapping for the head's UV, and I mixed methods together for the UV of the other elements. You should pay close attention as to whether UVs are good or bad, have a direct relationship with drawing textures, and so on. I often let the parts which can be seen take up more UV space, although this won't work for cartoon styles. You can also use other UV tools, such as DeepUV. See (Fig.17 - 21) for the main elements of my environment.

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Texturing

My works all have a realistic style, so there is much work involved in the texturing process. Almost all the textures used for this character were 3072 by 3072. Because there were so many things in the environment I decided to use small textures for the objects in the distance, and for some less important things I just used a Colour map, and no Bump map. First of all, I created the Colour map by hand painting, and used some photographs in Photoshop. Colour maps require care and attention because there are so many pores, patches, veins, muscles, and bones below the skin, and so the skin's colour has many changes and variations. When I finished the Colour map, I desaturated the colour and made the Bump and Specular maps. I then changed the tone and details of the Colour map to the Epidermal Scatter Colour, Subdermal Scatter Colour, and then changed the Specular map to the Reflection map. I also overlaid a Noise map on the Reflection map so that the Refraction map looked more random. I achieved a very detailed Normal map in Mudbox by using a high-resolution model. I used body paint to remove texture seams and made all other textures in the same way. The main textures can be seen in (Fig.22 - 26).

Fig. 22

Fig. 22

In addition to all the above, I also have my own texture collections to satisfy my special requirements. (Fig.27 - 28) shows my "storeroom" of plant textures, and all other textures used for this piece.

Fig. 23a

Fig. 23a

Fig. 23

Fig. 23

Materials & Shaders

There are different kinds of materials used in my works, including wood, metal, glass, plants, skin, and so on. What I needed to do was to make them look different. Fortunately, Maya is a great software containing many different kinds of shaders. I generally used Blind to do wood and rough metal; Phong for glass and water surfaces; Lambert for dry grass and cloth (Fig.29 - 30).

Fig. 24

Fig. 24

Fig. 25

Fig. 25

Someone once asked me how to connect Mental Ray Fast Skin shader, but everyone has their own way. In my own opinion, I think that it's best for controlling every parameter as best as I can. I therefore used about eight maps to control the more important parameters (such as Diffuse Colour, Epidermal Scatter Colour, Subdermal Scatter Colour, Primary Weight, Secondary Weight and so on). My own experience is that we can connect a Colour map to an overall colour or diffuse colour, but their effects have great differences. If there is some pure black in your colour map then you shouldn't connect it to overall colour, because if you do so then your final rendered image will have some pure black. In addition, the SSS effect of some places, like the ears, cannot be too high, that is not being too reddish, because a real man wouldn't be like that. Instead we need the feeling of skin to be somewhere between plastic and wax. My network and parameters can be seen in Fig.31 - 32.

Fig. 26

Fig. 26

Fig. 27

Fig. 27

Lighting

I was then able to move onto testing my lighting, for which I used Mental Ray's IBL with an HDR picture and several lights, for this special purpose. Some were used to simulate the lighting of the original oil painting, some were for Global Illumination, some were for achieving higher details with negative intensity, and were used some for highlights. I also added a Spot light in the top, left corner of the whole picture, to create a beam of light. The purpose of this was so that I could make the whole scene more unified and hopeful. Because the beam of light was formed from Light Fog, in order to achieve more detail I overlaid a Noise layer onto the Light Fog.

Hair & Fur

I used Paint Effects to finish the character's eyebrows and eyelashes in Maya (you can also use textures to do this, of course). The character's hair however needed much more time. I extracted curves from the original NURBS patches to become the guide of the Maya plug-in, Shave And A Haircut, by Joe Alter. The hair had to be in harmony with the tone of the face, and also needed to be blowing in the wind (Fig.33).

Fig. 28

Fig. 28

Matte Painting & Background Plants

Because this is not a matte painting tutorial, I won't say too much about this stage. I used a Maya plug-in, Xfrog V4.0, and a 2D texture plan technique, to create the woods. I must thank Xfrog here, because it makes enough details of 3D plants for matte painting, however I did spend a lot of time adjusting and testing this plug-in so that it would work better for me (Fig.34). (You can visit www.greenworks.com where there are many tutorials about Xfrog.)

Fig. 29

Fig. 29

Rendering

I rendered the image multipass, which allowed me to easily modify and control the passes. How many passes, and how to set the render passes, is different for other works. I rendered the character, clothing, boat, and water, separately. This cost a lot in time, but I was able to easily compose them this way. You can see some render passes in Fig.35.

Fig. 30

Fig. 30

Composing

I put all the layers into Photoshop and made use of my skills to get them working better. For example, I used the Lens Flare to create an atmosphere, adjusted layers to correct colour, added a Noise effect, and so on (Fig.36 - 37).

Refining

I finally refined my picture even further, to make it better still, by adding more details to the grass, sharpening the picture, and so on.

 

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