The shader of the skin was realised by trying to maintain certain features, like the dryness of the mummy’s skin, but also the funny and cartoon-like appearance that I wanted him to possess. I therefore tried to maintain a high level of SSS (subsurface scattering) to take away the seriousness of the character and to give him at the same time a certain solidness.

I had to make a lot of trials before being satisfied with the result. The real challenge was being able to give it solidness without creating horror-like details. The secret was rendering it translucent, just like the cartoons, and adding very many specular and light strokes to let certain areas emerge.

(Fig08 - 09) In the first image I created a classical situation in a pyramid, but with a less dark and friendlier light coming in from the right; a direct yellow light played with the classical feature and the less lit area was blue. Of course, I also tried to give the entire scene an orange tone in order to communicate some cheerfulness through the situation.

(Fig10) In the second image I wanted to create another “impossible” situation! I wanted to show an embarrassed mummy in the bathroom as if being spied on by a person at the door, which is why I used a wide-angle framed shot.

Fortunately, the rig managed very well, even in this scene in which the model tends to have problems, above all with the pelvis and legs. I think it is very important to try to avoid symmetry. The eyes have to be able to roam around the scene, always finding new things (like the crooked feet or his bent back).

I prefer an environment to be rich in details, instead of classical, clean 3D interiors. I looked for references for bathrooms and tiles. As I found the right ones, I chose to model them rather than use a simple bump or displacement map, in order to have better control of the reflections.

Also, in this case, I wanted to take a tile away or dirty another one with various textures, so as not to have symmetry (as explained before). I later added some water, just to have more reflections and strokes of light.

(Fig12 - 17) I did the render in many steps. We could structure them in this way: beauty pass of the environment, beauty pass of the mummy, ambient occlusion, specular, Z-depth (to simulate the depth of field), and then many steps to stress or to decrease reflections and strokes of light. The ambient occlusion was very useful in the environment and is vital to the characters because it stresses the model and creates all the little shadowed areas which would get lost in the main context. I used a 2000 x 1600 resolution but, thanks to the various phases, every step was shorter than 5 minutes to render.