Making of Lensha by Loocas Duber, Czech Republic (Europe)



On these few pages, I’d like to share with you my techniques and processes I undertook in making of this portrait called simply “Lensha – portrait of a girl”. First of all, I’d like to note that this render was created as sort of a side-effect off the main purpose for this character, which, as you may know, were my training DVDs in which I teach how to model, unwrap and texture such a character, or rather, a girls bust. Secondly, I’d also like to note that I chose such looking character on purpose, I wanted to avoid such a cliché of portraying a super-nice, pure skin, blemishes-free, top-model chick you all know from various galleries. Not that there’s something wrong with that, but it just doesn’t fit to my tastes and also I’d like to show a different kind of a character to the audiences. Whether she’s beautiful or not, whatever she’s thinking while the picture of her was taken, why is she where she is, why is she dressed in this way, all this is left up to you to decide, which in fact, is also a certain, good, sign of an image, when people think about it and decide on their own what they’re actually seeing. And thirdly, note that this particular render was created at very high-res for later printing purposes, with which come a lot of obstacles and problems, as you’ll see later.

Preparation, References and Setting up

I take seriously the preparation process, whatever project I’m working on, because, if you’re prepared, nothing can catch you by surprise during the actual production and because this project was originally intended to be a short animation in the end (simply to demonstrate the point of correct mesh flow and anatomy and also to be put in my show reel :) ) I had to be very precise in preparing all references for the actual process of making all this to happen. Due to this project’s nature, it wasn’t such a big deal preparing all the stuff I’ll eventually need in the production.





First of all, I had to take some photo references for the actual character model, so I decided not to go for professional photo references, such as those from 3d.sk, they’re awesome, however, I wanted to demonstrate a “Do It Yourself” way, basically, whatever equipment you have, you can improvise and still get the work done on a high quality level! So I took photos of the subject and prepared for modeling. I usually work in a way that first, I place the reference planes in a 3d scene, then I trace off the photos using simple splines for later reference. During this process I pay attention to muscular structure of the subject determined from the other reference photographs, especially those where the girl makes weird faces. You can guess the muscle structure by the wrinkles occurring on her face during the expressions. When all this is set, I’m ready to start modeling. Yes, you can say, it was much easier on me in this case, since it was only about the face.


However, bear in mind that the face is actually pretty hard to get just right! You have to consider all the loops that’ll be placed in space to form the actual face geometry for later rigging and animation, therefore, it is usual practice you’ll model the head separate from the body and then after you get all the features just right, you will merge them together and join all the loops etc.