Making of Ashoanby Alexander Tomchuk, Ukraine


Scene Modeling

When the character was done, I have started with the scene. First of all I did very quick base model for the rock in 3ds max, then exported it into ZBrush to proceed with sculpting. Then I generated normal and ambient occlusion maps which was projected in ZBrush from the highest Subdivision level to the third one, because whole rock was very heavy to export in 3ds max, and third subdivision was like 17 000 polygons which was enough.



Texture for the rock you can see below. And actually here is the place I did a mistake, because overall resolution of the rock texture 4096x4096 which is good, if you want to see this rock from the middle distance. But in my case I have very close look on the 30% of the rock, and in full resolution of the final image it looks not very nice. So keep this in mind!


After all, I posed a character on the rock and shackled him with all those rusty chains. I understand that a lot of details and geometry is not visible on the final image and it was not necessary to model it. But it makes a lot of pleasure to create all this, and you can see it now, so it was not waste of time.



Lighting and Shading

For this image I used Global Illumination. So here are Sky light, 2 spot lights and one Sun. All light sources casting “Mental ray Shadow map” shadows.


As for the character, I used mental ray skin shader. Unlike human skin which needs to prepare unique specular map, subsurface scattering map and so on, I just copied diffuse map to Specular color and specular weight channels, and it worked out just fine (actually in this shader, maps is not so important as all other values which you can see on the next image). Leather shader based on “Arch & design” Leather type with further corrections.



Here is the render of the character with simple lights, and on the next image you can see how shader works on the textured character.