Making Of 'Prolapsed Eye'

The image "Prolapsed Eye" was initially a sketch by a friend of mine:
Yuri Sakovich www.thesakovich.com

Modeling

Modeling was very simple. I based my model off of the original sketch (Fig. 01) and created what is known as an organized mesh.

Fig. 01 d_Fig.

Fig. 01 d_Fig.

Meaning, that the topology of the model is in accordance with the muscle structure (Fig. 02). Once that was done, I made sure to set the scale to my liking and imported it into ZBrush to check it.

Fig. 02 d_Fig.

Fig. 02 d_Fig.

UV's

I took the base mesh and imported it into Unfold 3D, a UV Layout software. Aside from being incredibly fast, it gives me full control of my UV's and has a very intuitive and user-friendly interface (Fig. 03).

Fig. 03 d_Fig.

Fig. 03 d_Fig.

I then imported the model into ZBrush and made sure that the UV's were okay and that there were no overlapping UV's (The image is completely grey and has no red areas) (Fig. 04).

Fig. 04 d_Fig.

Fig. 04 d_Fig.

Sculpting

Sculpting in ZBrush was fairly simple and very straightforward. I used mainly the Standard, Move, Clay, ClayTubes and Smooth Brushes. I didn't use any Alphas for sculpting; I usually prefer to sculpt all my detail by hand. It's a challenge but the results are usually much nicer (Fig. 05a & Fig.05b).

Fig. 05a

Fig. 05b



The cloth was done in Maya and then sculpted in ZBrush as well (Fig. 06).

Fig. 06

Texturing

Texturing is one of the most creative and fun parts of the whole process. I didn't have any particular color scheme to work from, so I used what I felt would match the character best. I looked at some reference images and came up with an organic-like color scheme.  Polypainting was used for texturing, along with the dry-brushing technique. I used mainly the Spray Stroke along with Alpha 23. Once the base colors were applied, I then went over it with a very light coat of the skin color (Fig. 07).

Fig. 07

The same applies to the cloth (Fig. 08).

Fig. 08

Rendering

First I had to export several Displacement Maps from ZBrush. I normally export 32-bit Displacement Maps, as they are very simple to use and give the best results. I use Displacement Exporter 3 with the settings shown in Fig.09.

Fig. 09

The Rendering process was somewhat tedious due to Maya's incredible render pass system (...not). But the results were great. I exported a fairly high poly-count mesh, since this model will only be used for a still along with a simple Light Set-Up (Fig. 10), using two planes as the main light source and two spotlights as kickers.

Fig. 10

I used the Mental Ray Skin Shader with a Scale Conversion of about 25 and maps for the Subdermal Weight, and Backscatter Weight (Fig. 11) and rendered with Final Gather. I made separate Render Layers for the Color, SSS, Occlusion, Specularity, Reflection, Shadow, and a Backscatter pass. (Color, reflection, Fresnel, and Occlusion for Cloth also) (Fig. 12).

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Compositing

I also rendered out a few black and white masks to use for compositing the cloth. I used Photoshop to put the image together (Fig. 13). Here's a better look at my layer blending modes (Fig. 14).

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

The final image can be seen in Fig.15!

Fig. 15

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