Making of 'It's For You'

The Character

For this Making Of, an intermediate knowledge of 3D Studio Max and Mental Ray is required. I started work on this image after seeing a small photograph in a TV guide of Rodin's "Thinker", where the head had been replaced by a Logitech Quickcam, and I thought it would make a cool character.

I started out with the character, by finding a side and front profile of the Quickcam on Logitech's website (Fig01), and took those into Max. I then made a plane the same size as the image and made a standard material with the image, to set to the diffuse slot, and applied that to the plane for reference, and then placed the plane a little behind the centre line in the viewports grid. That way, all the lines and geometry that you draw, using the side viewport, appear in front of the image, so that you can see what you're doing (Fig02).

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

By right-clicking on the plane, and going into the properties, I froze the plane and de-activated, shown frozen in grey. That way the plane would stay in position at all times. I never use Max's image background (Ctrl-B) as reference, because I've had the image shift out of place, lock zoom, and pan all too often, and so for some reason it just doesn't seem to work for me. I then started drawing half of the profile of the camera sides using splines (Fig03), so that I could use the Lathe tool to create the geometry (Fig04).

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

After that I drew side profile splines for the parts of the camera that would later be cut out, using the front reference image (the microphone part, and the black part on top). Once I had those splines correct, I then used the Extrude tool, and made sure that the extrude length was large enough so that it would intersect with the complete geometry (Fig05). With that done, I selected all of the geometry and copied all of it once, and then hid the copied part so that I could used the Boolean operation to cut away the parts. I then selected the geometry and displayed the other geometry. Now, since I had the cut-out version selected, I could easily hide that, leaving the un-booleaned version. I then used Boolean again, but instead set it to Intersection, which then left me with just the intersected pieces that I could use (Fig06).

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig.

With the top bit of the camera's part selected, I used the shell to extrude it outwards a little, and converted it to polygon. I then deleted the lower side of it in the shell pull-down by using "select inner faces" and then converted the whole thing to poly. If you then select faces, the inner part will be selected (since you don't see this, it might as well not be there, and it saves memory). I selected the edges around the top part and used a slight Chamfer on it, followed by editing its smooth groups, so that it looked as a whole (Fig07). I did a lot of chamfering because there was going to be quite some reflection on it, especially on the black parts, and it gave a nicer, softer reflection transition than when using hard edges. With the new Mental Ray you can have this as a special effect, rather than real geometry, but I prefer it this way in case I want to use another renderer which doesn't have that same special effect. I used the same trick on the other pieces of the camera as well. And for the "mouth" part (and later also on the earplugs) I used Boolean to cut out the little holes in the mouth, and again chamfered the edges - it's all in the details! Now, if you notice, on the real camera there is a seam running around the sphere. To achieve that I just attached all the geometry that should have that seam into one polygon object, and then deleted half by selecting the faces, and mirrored the half. I then moved one half so that it was just slightly offset.

Fig.

Fig.

The inner part of the camera was just basically tubes copied a couple of times and set in the right position, with a small sphere in the middle (Fig08 - 09) - and that was the head.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig. 10

Fig. 10

The rest of the geometry was really just old-fashioned box modelling. I started out with a box, sliced edges into it and formed the shape of the models, making sure to make the topology so that I could later on easily detach the parts that were supposed to be black, from the parts that were supposed to be grey (as you can see in the images). I also made sure to make an extra edgeloop somewhere, so that I could use the open chamfer tool to make the seams (with small, plastic things there are almost always seams somewhere) (Fig10 - 12).

Fig. 11

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Fig. 12

Fig. 13

Fig. 13

And for the chest plate, I cut that out of the geometry with Boolean again, copied the copied part again, and placed one of the pieces a little way inside the chest. For the other part, after applying a shell, I again Chamfered the edges on top of the inner piece. This would later on make the Logitech lit logo appear under the chest plate, and give a better result (Fig13).

Fig. 14

Fig. 14

Once I had the character built I then started doing the materials, which is one of my favourite parts. I looked at the actual material of the camera and noticed that it behaved a bit like car paint does, in terms of the colour, and the way it becomes brighter and a slightly shifted colour where the light hits it, and also has a heavy falloff in colour. Normally, I would play around with falloff maps a little, but luckily for me, Mental Ray now has a car paint shader - so I used that. I set the colours to what I needed them to be, removed the flakes settings and lowered and blurred the reflections. I got it right in one go, so there wasn't much mystery to it at all (Fig14 - 15).

Fig. 15

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 16

For the black parts I simply used the arch material and made it black, with the RGB value of 010, 010, 010. I tried to avoid complete black because I've experienced problems with GI in the past using complete white and complete black). I used a falloff map set to Fresnel; I never use the standard fresnel that comes with materials, but instead always make my own using the map. The reason for this is that the standard fresnel may be mathematically correct, but I like it when even the part that is directly facing your eyes reflects just a tiny bit, so I can make the black part of the falloff map a dark grey. This way is quicker than tinkering with the fresnel's IOR, in my opinion. The chest plate has a small Logitech logo. I found a good sized black and white logo on Google, and took it into Photoshop. I used the "select by color" range to delete the white part of the image (I firstly made sure the background was transparent), leaving just the black part, and then inverted the black logo to white and copied that onto the alpha channel. When that was done I saved the whole image as a tiff file to keep the transparency and alpha information (Fig16).

Fig. 17

Fig. 17

In Max, I used a shellac material, with an arch and design material in the top slot. I made that black, and put the tiff with alpha information into the transparency slot (Fig17 - 19).

Fig. 18

Fig. 18

Fig. 19

Fig. 19

Fig. 20

Fig. 20

The other material was a Mental Ray material with a lume glow in the diffuse slot. I set the diffuse colour to blue. The other slots got the tiff image again. With all that done, I finally set the shellac blend to 50, and that's basically all the interesting parts of the robot now done (Fig20).

Fig. 21

Fig. 21

The Cell Phone (Fig 21)

Fig. 22

Fig. 22

There are a lot of Boolean operations involved with this one. Since (again) the image was not intended for animation, the topology was not so important. I started out by finding some good reference images on Google. I actually came across a good one which had the front, rear and side profiles on it, and I also happen to have the same phone myself, which is also why I made this one. I should have made a "PPBL" though because it's much prettier and more interesting to look at. The image above is not exactly the same as the one I have, as it's perhaps an earlier version of the same phone (Fig22).

Fig. 23

Fig. 23

I cut the image up in Photoshop and positioned and applied to it some planes, as I did before with the character. Since I made this model a couple of months ago I don't have the actual images that I used now, but you should be able to follow what I did, and I have used the phone's 3D model to compensate for this. I started out with the front of the phone. I drew a plane using the front view, and converted it to polygons. I then cut some edges over it, using the slice plane tool, and edited it until it sat over the image correctly. I then moved to the side profile and edited it so that it also aligned well with the side profile (Fig23).

Fig. 24

Fig. 24

With the front part done I could then easily do that silver line running around the cell phone, by extruding faces and tweaking them into the right shape. For the back part of the mobile, I did exactly the same thing as for the front part, using a reference image of the back and side profile. That was the hardest part, and from there on in it was just a matter of cutting out the places where the screen and the buttons were supposed to come, using the Boolean. By using Booleans you can easily make the buttons by using the edges around the holes to create splines, by using the Create Shape tool in the Editable Polygon pull-down menus. I extruded those splines and used the Chamfer tool to chamfer the edges around the buttons (Fig24 - 26).

Fig. 25

Fig. 25

Fig. 26

Fig. 26

Fig. 27

Fig. 27

With the keypads, aside from doing the above, I also made an extra slice. If you look at the phone you can see that every button has a little slice through the middle - for grip. So I made that extra slice to make the button slope up and down a little, as in the image.

For the texturing I used arch mats; one black one, again with a fresnel and blurred reflection, which I used for the matt parts of the phone. For the front, I made another black one with fresnel falloff, but if you look closely at the real phone you can see that it's a slightly brushed metal material (you can't really notice this on pictures, but the real phone has it). So in the falloff picture I used a noise material, setting the size to very small, and tiling was set in the Z-direction to as small as possible. This stretched the noise map and gave a brushed effect to the material. For the last part, I used an anisotropic effect to finish it off (Fig27 - 28).

Fig. 28

Fig. 28

Fig. 29

Fig. 29

The silver part was just an arch mat with a high reflection, and very blurred. For the keypads I took an image of the phone into Photoshop, and cut out the keys from the photo. Then, using contrast and brightness to edit the image, I made it extreme black and white. I used the same alpha map trick that I also used for the Logitech face plate (Fig29). I then used that to make sure that the key material had the actual characters transparent, and that the rest was filled. This way, when I put a plane behind it with a glowing material, the keys would light up, but the buttons would stay normal, as would happen with the real cell phone (Fig30).

Fig. 30

Fig. 30

Fig. 31

Fig. 31

The Scene

The scene itself was dead simple. I just made a plane for the ground, and quickly painted a very simple background in Photoshop, and set it as the scenes environment background. I then positioned the character and phone as I wanted it, and positioned the camera as well. I gave the floor a slightly reflective material, and for the lighting I made 2 Mental Ray materials, set a lume glow material to the mental ray base, and gave one a blue colour, and one a yellowish, beige colour. I made sure that the intensity was set pretty high, and applied each to one of two boxes. I then set off the camera to the sides of the character. This was for the front and back light. I lastly positioned a skylight, and a directional light. The earphones and wires were made with the same techniques that I used for the rest of the models. You can see this in the images. That's basically it from start to finish, and there was not a lot of fancy tricks used, just clean, old simple modelling.

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