This is a ZBrush screengrab of the final pose with the costume elements in their blockout stage before being retopologised. The beard was sculpted just to get an idea of what shape would work with the rest of the model. The intention was to create it using hair in Max.
Texturing - I won’t go into the texturing too much, as there is a lot of information online covering the use of the FastSSS material for mental ray. This project was my first try at using it for a whole character and I haven’t really got the hang of it yet. I used a lot of photographic reference taken from www.3d.sk and used ZBrush’s projection master to help with projecting the photographs. The costume elements are pretty much all mental ray a&d materials with the usual diffuse, bump and spec maps. Much of the costume was covered in hair so I didn’t go into much detail with the textures. I exported displacement maps from ZBrush and used them to displace the body elements; looking back I didn’t actually set this up properly so the result is not perfect.
Lighting - My idea for lighting the character was to use the qualities of the mrSkyPortal lights for mental ray. They give soft shadows and a good falloff of light and I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn how to use them properly. I also used some spotlights linked to specific objects like the sword and the eyes and face to highlight those areas a bit more. I didn’t use any GI or final gather as I wanted to control the light a bit more with fill and bounce lights to create a dramatic lighting effect. I used a lot of rim lighting just because I liked the theatrical effect that it gave.
Hair - Hair and fur was a big part of this character primarily because of his long beard and the fact that some of his clothes are made of animal furs. This part of the process took a lot of time, experimentation and it has to be said, frustration. I used the hair & fur modifier that comes with Max, with the hair rendering set to mrPrim for rendering in Mental Ray. The basic idea for how I approached the hair came from Master Zap’s excellent mental ray blog, in which he discusses the use of the fast rasterizer setting and lights with mental ray shadow maps with transparent shadows. This method can render hair relatively quickly and well although it has some drawbacks.
I made copies of all the geometry that I wanted to grow hair from, then deleted faces and used density maps to control the hair growth. Much of the hair I was able to control using the styling tools as it was fairly short, some splines were used in areas where I needed a specific shape. I ran into a problem on the beard where there seemed to be a limit on the amount of segments a hair could have so I couldn’t have long unbroken beard hairs that were also frizzy. I had to create a tapered tail-like geometry coming out of his chin and comb the hair along it. The result is obviously not perfect.
MrSkyPortal lights cannot use mental ray shadow maps with transparent shadows so I had to use spotlights to light the hair and line them up with my existing lights. I had all the hair objects on a separate layer with the model geometry matting them out and the idea was to comp them over the the bald model in Fusion. I ran into another problem in the fact that the mental ray matte/shadow material seems to crash Max when using the fast rasterizer option. I had to get around this by rendering a layer with all the geometry as a solid black colour and all the hair with a self illuminated white a&d shader to create an alpha pass for the hair. Here are the final passes I used for compositing; the base render, ambient occlusion, hair and hair alpha.
Compositing - I composited all the passes in Eyeon Fusion. I didn’t do anything complicated, just really merging one pass over another and replacing the hair pass alpha with the one I rendered out using a channel boolean. I colour corrected each pass to get the lighting looking how I wanted. The background was made using noise and gradients and there was a bit of glow added to the image. The final image was cropped and a gradient was used to make a slight vignette effect. Thanks for reading this overview. If you have any questions feel free to email me.
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