'ZBrush'

I modelled the pistol, grenades and knife with the same kind of approach. Weapons were UV-mapped in the same fashion as the other objects (Fig.11 – detailed weapons).

The fun part began here! I exported all of the parts separately and sculpted all deformations and shape details in ZBrush. When I was done with the detailing, I baked the displacement maps in ZBrush and applied them directly to level 0 or 1 subdivision of the base meshes in 3ds Max. I painted away any baked artefacts in Photoshop (Fig.12 - detailed character clothing geometry).

First I set up a temporary scene where I baked AO maps for parts that I thought would need them (Fig.13 & 14 – AO & baked).

I started with the fabric for clothing and accessories, as I felt this would be the hardest part to get a nice looking material that would work fine in close-ups, too. I started digging my closets at home, looking for various materials that I could scan – camera bags, old military belts and T-shirts. I then scanned them in at high resolution, after carefully flattening and tightening the material under a large book. This way I was able to get very neat textures that had even lighting and no lens curvature, blur or optical artefacts (Fig.15 – scanned textures).

Next I made the textures tile-able. After this I made normal maps and displacement maps for the canvas materials in CrazyBump (beta version – I really need some money to buy the final version!). Stitches and dirt were made with separate texture layers so that I could achieve good, detailed fabric patterns in close-ups too, without wasting too much memory (Fig.16 – stitch setup; Fig.17 – stitch map setup, similar for colour, displace and other channels; Fig.18 – textures for mechanical parts).

Colour textures for the skin were created in Photoshop, mostly painted, and I also used some noise and skin patterns from photo material (Fig.19 – head textures). The majority of the skin details originated from the displacement map of the head, which I processed with levels, and after that I ran a high pass filter on it to get neat skin details. I then overlaid this image on top of a pretty low resolution colour layer. This saved me the hassle of creating a bump map, too, as I used displacement to render all the high frequency “bump” details (Fig.20 – head displacement map).