Making of the Countess by Plamen Iliev, Bulgaria Web: www.piliev.com


Unwrapping was pretty straightforward, less distortion and optimal texture space coverage are easily achieved with the Unwrap UVW modifier and the Pelt function. It took a lot of time as there were many objects I intended to use displacement maps on them.

Once the unwrapping was done I had to make sure the Max to ZBrush pipeline worked correctly. That included no overlapping UV faces, proper UV region spacing for multi-meshes and no UV faces going overboard.




I added wrinkles to the shoes, skirt, corset and the shirt, paying attention to the way the character was posed and the type of the fabrics. The displacements were 4K or 8K maps and used 32-bits per channel. An 8K image with 32 bits per channel is 768MB in size so be prepared for some heavy loading and memory usage.

I used extensively the mr arch and design shader. It’s a material that could successfully simulate all kinds of surfaces. I used it for the latex/leather objects and the shirt. The shirt had some transparency and glow added. I also used some generic bump and specular mapping. I tried to layer many shaders, one on top of the other, and mix them to get a complex surface.

Painting the maps for the skin was reduced down to just her face, left arm and legs. I used 4K maps and BodyPaint and Photoshop to paint them. I used varying colors and noisy brushes.