Now that I've finished the modeling, it's time to skin it. Doing this I can make the pose, like my concept drawing. I built a fairly simple skeleton rig with max's standard bones and added some simple controls for the limbs. I added the skin modifier on top of my poly surface first, and then all the bones of the skeleton rig.

As soon as the skin phase is finished, it's time to do some texturing work!... I added Unwrap UVW modifier and started pulling and pushing the UV's, trying to make them as flat as possible. It's good way to be in sub object mode, so you can see directly in the view port, all the polygons you select in the UV editor.

After I opened photo shop, I imported a screen shot of the UV's, and started painting the diffuse map. I wanted the skin to be smooth and translucent, so I don't need to create a bump map for the skin.

I've created a spot light. I added a Volume light to Atmospheres & Effects rollout. The shad ers played a very important role in what I was trying to achieve for how the skin should look. For achieving what I had in mind, I needed the light to bounce around to create that soft and warm look. I used mental ray render, because it can do Global illuminations & Final Gather calculations. Another important reason for using mental ray was the fact that it supports subsurface scattering effect; very important for creating the soft and translucent effect . Here is a test I've done using the elements mentioned before,(volume light & translucent effect).

3DTotal Advertisement - We need your support! As well as you tutorial hungry people eating through a terabit of bandwidth each month we also have many additional staff and running costs involved in creating these free pages. We want to continue bringing you many free tutorials and resources everyday, so PLEASE check out our products and amazon affiliate schemes via the above banners. Many thanks!

For achieving the translucence, I recommend everyone to play with these shaders and find your own way to do the SSS effect. You can achieve interesting looks by just playing around with the parameters. Mental ray for max comes with different SSS shaders. I chose the SSS Fast material(mi) shader. I've started playing with the parameters of this awesome shade offer, trying to get the translucent look of the skin. One important fact is the number of samples for this shader. The higher the better, but consider this, it slows down the rendering process by doing this.

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3