Making of 'Hunter'

Modelling

I tried to stay as close as possible to the given reference (Fig01), which was just a ¾ sketch depicting the main proportions, with some details here and there, and the colour scheme for texturing. Not having an overly detailed sketch is good for me, since it allows more room for personal touches and pushes me to figure out visual and mechanical detailed solutions, whilst still keeping the overall feeling unaltered. I immediately recognised three kinds of elements that I had to deal with: a generic male body covered with a dark grey under suit; a dark-blue, light, rubber armour; and a metallic, light-blue, heavy armour. My modelling workflow was therefore bound to these priorities.  Firstly, the body, which sets the figure proportions, would later on have to be covered with armour, and so with this in mind, and a tight deadline to reach, I took a generic, male model which I have made previously and started changing his proportions using the Free Form Deformation Box and Soft Selections (Fig02).

As you can see, I left the facial features and most of muscle definition undefined, because those parts were supposed to be covered by armour. Soft Selection is an extremely valuable tool for quickly tweaking proportions, just be sure to also select the Edge Distance, with an appropriate value in its roll-out menu, to achieve a much more localised control of the Falloff. As you will notice in Fig03, I also made large use of the Symmetry modifier during the modelling process, and used Turbo Smooth with 2 levels of subdivision set constantly at the top of the stack. By assigning a short-cut to the "show end result on/off" button you can easily model at step zero and immediately see the overall, smoothed result by pressing a button (I use the space bar, for example). Once I was satisfied with the general proportions of the body under the armour, it was time to proceed; covering the body with metal plates. Of course, the dark-blue ones were applied first since they are seen closest to the body, followed by the light-blue plates.

No special techniques were used here, and once again the modelling was in subdivision with the very same stack as shown in (Fig03).

I usually start with a single quad, and then extrude the edges all around, trying to stay close with the volumes and shapes of the given reference. There was a lot of turnaround of the meshes; you need to observe the volumes from almost every possible point of view to be sure that the volumes and shapes are solid, and of course you must also be aware not to not go too far away from the body underneath. When satisfied with the general volume, a Shell modifier helped me to give thickness to the piece. In this phase, I tended not to bother too much about every single rivet, hole
or cut; I simply tried to develop a good quad topology of the main volumes.

Of course, the topology is achieved by taking count of the main cuts and holes, but the rest can be easily done with a normal map or a bump map - it's up to you to decide whether a single detail is worth being modelled or put into a Bump map. I usually adopt comfortable criteria, which means that if something looks tricky to me, whether to be carved or extruded into an existing geometry, then I usually put it into a Normal map. When you make something for production you don't usually have enough time to model everything, so you need to set your priorities.
 

Fig. 03

Fig. 03

As you can see in Fig04 - 11 a lot of cuts are not currently modelled at this point, but have been done with a Bump map.

So basically, all the modelling followed this workflow, and most of the detailing, as you can see, has been left to my own imagination (and has been a lot of fun!). After modelling all of the armour I then modelled, in Subdivision, some folds on the body underneath, in areas where they were more visible, like the middle of the arms and the backs of the knees. This presentation of renders was done in Mental Ray; the material is a simple Mental Ray SSS fast skin material, whilst the lighting is just a couple of Photometric Area lights and a back Omni light with Final Gather turned on (Fig12 - 14).

Fig. 08

Fig. 08

Texturing Materials

Basically, texturing-wise, I divided the mesh by materials, which means that every material shared its unique texture sheet, with very few exceptions. Every piece of mesh therefore needed to be UV edited to achieve this. I found the use of Pelt mapping to be very convenient - and the best choice - for complex shapes like these. After UV editing I usually render a template of the UV (after subdividing the mesh at least at step 1) so that I have a base to paint over the diffuse texture. (Fig15 - 16) shows the rendered texture sheet for the metal armour material and the rubber armour material.

The diffuse texture is a mix of photorealistic metal textures, and painted rust and dirt. For this I used a free brush collection made by Andreas Byström (www.ericknelson.com/wurp/dirtbrushes.abr) (Fig17).

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

These brushes were simply great when creating variations of dirt and rust, and having the UV template in a underlying layer helped me to place the dirt, scratches, decals, and everything else, exactly where I wanted it. Material-wise (take for example the light-blue, heavy armour), the other few materials were very similar, with few exceptions, like the leather under-suit and some chrome parts (Fig18).

Fig19 is basically a Max blend material. The idea behind it was to blend two different materials with the same Diffuse map but different Specular properties. This gave the idea that the scratched areas of the armour have a different, shinier metal underneath. I could have also chosen to have a totally different material sharing a different metal Diffuse map as an underlying metal, but in this case I simply decided that I was comfortable enough with the same Diffuse texture. To blend the two different Specular material properties I used a grey scale mask (Fig20) where the darkest parts were able to show the shinier material underneath.

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

Here, again, when painting the mask I used custom, jagged brushes to achieve a natural feeling of random scratches. Specular maps were derived from the Diffuse map; I usually put a Hue / Saturation regulation level on top of the Diffuse map, bringing the Saturation slide to zero, to achieve a grey scale result. At this point I applied another Brightness / Contrast regulation level on top to regulate the intensity of the Specular parts. With both regulation levels in a folder, and having saved the PSD document, allowed me to quickly change parameters for the fine-tuning of the Specular. It was also an interesting possibility to drag/copy the Specular folder on top of a different Diffuse map, therefore maintaining the same Specular values (Fig21).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

The leather material was just a simple Max material with a fairly high Specularity. Cables were a chrome material reflecting an HDRI map, and glows were just self-illuminated, standard materials. Sample materials can be seen in (Fig22).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

The render was done using Brazil with a simple Spot light and a very low intensity Global Illumination (Fig23 - 25).

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

The Illustration

Already having a monster model which I created some time back for the game itself (Fig26), my intention was to put both the Hunter and the monster, Karnagor, into a nice composition, showing both of them in a sort of relationship. Moreover, everything needed to have hints that the scene was situated in London itself. The monster model was made in Subdivision and most of its detail was created by Normal mapping (sculpting was done in ZBrush).

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

I asked an artist friend of mine, Antonio Mossucca (www.3d50antonio.com), if he was interested in helping me with the composition. I briefly explained to him what I wanted to achieve and he came out with some nice sketches, which were pretty close in terms of their composition to the final picture (Fig27 - 28).

The only element I was missing at this point was a model of the Big Ben tower, so I decided to make a fairly low poly version of - not too detailed though because it was supposed to be a background element (Fig29), and most of the detail would have been provided by the texture.I also missed a sort of weapon, and a terrain. For the weapon I wanted something which was used by snipers, with scope - not necessarily something futuristic, but I preferred something which had been more roughly adapted to being used as a flame-thrower. So I collected some rifle references from here and there and I came up with a model for my weapon (Fig30).

The first thing I did was put the hunter in pose. I honestly didn't make any skeleton, I just used Soft Selection and Free Form deformations to do this, and it worked pretty well. The same was done for the monster in the background. The terrain was relatively easy to mode; a grid plane sliced savagely to get some nice cracks, with some geometric rocks scattered here and there - no Subdivision was involved at all (Fig31). So when all the desired elements were textured and put into scene, it was time for the lighting and rendering...

Fig. 25

Fig. 25

Let's say that I didn't want to achieve anything photorealistic, but rather a more painterly feeling. To achieve this, especially when dealing with 3D images, the post process done in a 2D application is crucial. So in this case, it was often a waste of time to spend a lot of time in realistic and complicated shaders, as most of their properties would be simply washed out during the post process work. It was better with plain materials and lighting. The basic light setup consisted of a main Spot light (it was better if it wasn't too coloured) and a back Omni light. A few Omni lights were also used for the glowing parts here and there. I didn't involve any Global Illumination, just a plain scan line render, because another pass of Ambient Occlusion was to be used later on (Fig32). I later made an Ambient Occlusion pass which was to be composited further down the line (Fig33).

Fig. 26

Fig. 26

Fig. 27

Fig. 27

To obtain this in Brazil was very simple; I used the render pass control and the white plaster materials. It was then time for the heavy post processing work to get underway... Opening Photoshop, I began by setting a mood, by choosing my colour scheme. The base render did not have a dominant colour on purpose; I prefer to have much more control with this in post work (I love flexibility). In this case I wanted to use some warm tones, so I started by painting the background clouds in with brown / red tones - not too extreme in saturation. I put the Ambient Occlusion layer in Multipy mode, with the layer opacity set to around 20%. I also put a Hue / Saturation level connected to this layer, in order to change the hue of the figures to brown and reddish tones, to match in with the lighting of the background (Fig34). As you can see, the rendered Big Ben has been put in a layer behind the main figures, and its colour was also altered. I painted some smoke in the foreground on a separate layer using a soft-edged brush with a low opacity (Fig35).

It was then time to add some scattered fire on a new layer... I made extensive use of some real footage pictures of fire, which I had collected on a black background some time ago when I bought a CA, called Pyromania, full of these pictures. They were pretty easy to composite in Hard Light mode, since the black goes away and only the flame remains. I also painted a yellow highlight, in Soft Light mode, over the leg of the monster, because I expected some light from the fire to reflect upon it (Fig36). I wanted the smoke to move in the direction of the composition. Painting this was rather simple: a round, hard-edged brush first, for mid-tones and shadows, then it was simply a matter of blending the "blob" together using the Smudge tool and leaving the hard edges in areas where the light source was supposed to hit. The Burn tool also helped at this point to enhance the brightest parts of the smoke. I introduced some painted sparks close to the fire, and added some debris floating around in the air too, which gave a chaotic feeling to the picture and helped it to look less static (Fig37).

Things at this point were going to be a little monochromatic, so I introduced some bluish tones to the background and the shadows, through the Colour Balance tool (Ctrl - B). I also noticed that, at high resolutions, some of the textures were going to lose their definition. A quick trick to reduce this effect was to put a grey scale high resolution sample of a similar texture in Overlay mode over the interested areas (Fig38).

Fig. 33

Fig. 33

The final picture can be seen in (Fig39). As you can see I made the tones even warmer  and more saturated by adding a general, orange, Soft Light layer. Some fog was also added in the background to give to the scene a little more depth. I painted blood splotches onto the monster, and brightened some areas of the Hunter, to make him pop-up more from the rest of the imagery. The lamp featured in the background was painted over of a real, London street-lamp. Thank you for reading!

Fig. 34 _Fig_34(finalImage).jpg

Fig. 34 _Fig_34(finalImage).jpg

Related links

To see more by Alessandro Baldasseroni, check out Prime - The Definitive Digital Art Collection and Digital Art Masters: Volume 7

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