Making Of 'Angioletta Giolli'

After having collected some pictures of the famous actress Angelina Jolie, I decided to use some of them to help give life to my homonymous creation Angioletta Giolli.

Before starting the modeling phase it was important to take a moment to properly observe the features of Jolie, especially her cheekbones, which are very particular and pronounced (Fig.01).

Fig. 01 d_Fig.

Fig. 01 d_Fig.

Starting from two references - front and lateral view - I modeled the low poly face, imported it into ZBrush and increased the subdivision level by two steps. Then I was able to concentrate on adding details to critical areas of morphology like the mouth, nose, bowed eyebrows, eyes and ears (Fig.02 & Fig.03).

d_Fig.

d_Fig.

d_Fig.

d_Fig.

During the working process, I was careful to maintain a clean and morphologically correct mesh and to avoid disharmony, in order to permit efficient modeling in ZBrush without too many difficulties. I added loops only on the more important areas, so that I had a more manageable mesh for the modeling.

As you can see, I added only one additional iteration to obtain a density that satisfied me. I obtained the bump map from the diffusion texture (Fig.04).

Fig. 04 d_Fig.

Fig. 04 d_Fig.

Having completed the model, I imported it in 3ds Max, where I rigged the head and neck to pose the subject with a simple rotation of the head (Fig.05).

Fig. 05 d_Fig.

Fig. 05 d_Fig.

 


In the end, after I'd positioned the camera and chosen a typical portrait view, I added a leather string in order to put across the idea that the woman is wearing a dress.

For the shading, I was inspired by various tutorials I had found on the web. I also studied how the various slots worked in order to obtain a realistic skin. Here are my sss fast skin settings (Fig.06 & Fig.07).

Fig. 06 d_Fig.

Fig. 06 d_Fig.

Fig. 07 d_Fig.

Fig. 07 d_Fig.

For the illumination I considered various photographical techniques and decided to put the primary light between the camera and the subject (45°), and then slightly moved to her right-hand side. Next, I added two backlights to emphasize the silhouette of the face and to obtain more depth for the final image. Finally, I added a fill light to compensate for the dark areas (Fig.08).

Fig. 08 d_Fig.

Fig. 08 d_Fig.

For the final render I decided to use mental ray as my new render engine because it is already integrated in 3ds Max. I also used final gathering, but not global illumination. In the settings of the FG, I used 0 bounces to obtain a low render time, compared to the complexity of the sss fast skin settings. I then rendered a beauty pass of the scene (Fig.09).

_Fig.

_Fig.

_Fig.

_Fig.

I created a composition in Photoshop that permitted making last minute, substantial changes to the final image. For the background, I added an image of a curtain that I had turned black. I made the hair with the Hair and Fur modifier, and rendered it separately. Then I combined the hair, background and beauty passes in Photoshop to create the final image (Fig.10 & Fig.11).

Fig. 11

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