Making Of 'The Chase'

Introduction

Hi everyone! First of all, thank you very much to the 3DTotal team for giving us the chance to write this tutorial - I hope it proves to be helpful to many artists out there.

Anyway this artwork was actually done by a team of three artists to promote the capability of our new animation studio, which specializes in a high quality 3D animation service, called Enspire Studio. As for the The Chase itself, we were trying to get an action-oriented sci-fi scene, combined with surreal lighting, set in the distant future.

The credits for the team are as follows:

• Character modeling: Herwin Arkiando
• Environment modeling: Susan Angela
• Lighting/Shader/Compositing: Andre Surya

References

References were important for this piece as we were creating a character and environment that is out of this world. Therefore we decided to combine lots of references of many great robotic sci-fi CG pictures from the internet.

Modeling

The modeling was a challenging part, particularly for the character as we wanted to get the right combination of fast-moving-ninja-like robot, but not lose his body proportions at the same time. The character design itself was actually a brainstorming idea based on feedback from someone else in team. Here is the character detail from a different angle (Fig.01).

Fig.01

Fig.01


Here is the wireframe version (Fig.02).

Fig.02

Fig.02

For the environment we actually created the full environment for the scene, as a learning process. In the interior of this huge building, we trying to create a sci-fi otherworld combined with spiritual advancement. Here is the shaded version of the environment (Fig.03).

Fig.03

Fig.03

Here is the wireframe version of the environment (Fig.04).

Fig.04

Fig.04

Texturing

As for this part, it was surprisingly simple. We created the textures for the character and the interior mostly by painting in Photoshop, combined with a lot of metal shaders. The texture is basically a color-based texture to determine the basic color of the character/ interior building. Fig.05 shows a screenshot of a flat render of the texturing for the character.

Fig.

Fig.

Shader

The shader played a big role in the whole image, as we were trying to give the character and environment a metallic feel, partly based only on a color texture. For the shader we used many Arch & Design materials mental ray, mainly for the metal look that we were looking for. Some dirt and cloud noise shaders were also applied to both the character and environment. Some shader example pictures have been included in the following Lighting/Rendering section.

Lighting/Rendering

We didn't have very complicated lighting; we just used a basic 3-point lighting setup. We did separate RGB light on separate passes and separated three volumetric lights for the character.

As for the rendering part, this part was really important for the image as about 50% or more of the image consisted of so many different passes. There were more than 35 passes altogether, mainly consisting of:

• Metal Shader
• Dirt Shader
• Cloud/noise shader
• Volumetric lights
• RGB lights
• RGB selection
• Separate diffuse lights: Specular, HDRI and AO

Fig.06 - 09 show some examples of the important shader/lighting passes for the character.

Fig.06 - Diffuse/Specular

Fig.06 - Diffuse/Specular

Fig.07 - Reflection

Fig.07 - Reflection

Fig.08 - Ambient

Fig.08 - Ambient

Fig.09 - Dirt/rust

Fig.09 - Dirt/rust

Compositing

Compositing was also very important as this part was actually combining all the shader/output renders and edit the image to its full potential. We carefully crafted all the details and added dirt/scratches on the character by painting on the character and foreground railing, as well as a lot of passes adjustment, color correction, Bullet FX, depth of field, Z-Depth fog, additional volumetric, final cropping, background matte painting, glow, vignette, lens flare, and a bit of motion blur. All of those steps were done in Photoshop editing. The PSD file itself grew to more than 500 MB in one file since it had many high res passes all in one place.

Here is shaded version of the image (Fig.10).

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Here is the sample of just the passes combined with a bit of color correction (Fig.11).

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

And here is the final image, after a lot of adjustment, combined with some painting and editing in Photoshop (Fig.12).

Fig. 13

Fig. 13


And finally, the final version of the environment from different angles (Fig.13).

Fig.13

Fig.13

Thank you very much for reading our tutorial - I hope you found it useful. For more information about our company you can visit: http://www.enspirestudio.com or please don't hesitate to e-mail us at: info@enspirestudio.com.

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