Making of Waiting by Guillaume Vialaneix, France Web: www.guillaume-vialaneix.com

Hi everyone! Quick presentation of the project before starting. The idea behind this was to create a render that looked like a still image from a film noir movie. With that in mind I pictured a woman, standing, waiting for something, someone?, in the rain. I took this project as a way to learn and experiment new techniques (I had never really done a woman in 3D, textured the way I did for this etc.).

Few specifications; everything was done in 3dsmax and Photoshop and was rendered with Mental Ray. No real limit poly wise as this was done only for a still image. The textures were done in 8k and 16bit color depth and the final image was rendered at a 5475 x 3600 resolution (I really, really love HD...).

First stop, modeling. For this project I didn’t do anything fancy with the modeling and everything is pretty straight forward. I used the good old poly by poly technique. For the head, I know a lot of people start with the eyes but for some reason I prefer starting with the nose. I just layed out a couple of polys to get a very rough nose shape and moved on to the eye socket, mouth, etc. It started a bit generic looking but with lots of tweaks using smooth selections I started defining a bit more the aspects I wanted the face to have.

I didn’t have anyone’s face in mind so I experimented with different versions by using morph targets until I found something I liked. This took quite a while but was also quite fun!

The same technique was used for the rest of the modeling process, always starting with a simple quad.

For the texturing process I used a collection of head photos I bought on 3d.sk a few years ago. To create the head texture I decided to test a projection technique. Let me first say that there is probably an easier way to do this using projections but, I don’t know it (feel free to contact me if you do!) so I kind of worked myself into this not really knowing how it would work out. My technique consisted of unwraping the UVs like a normal UV layout but also unwraping them from a front, side, back, under and top view. On each UV layout I assembled bits and pieces of the photos I had, in Photoshop, until I had a full head for each view. I then switched back to 3dsmax and baked each view on to the final UVed head. All I had to do then was assemble the baked results in Photoshop to make the final texture. It might seem a bit of a pain to do all of this but it’s the easiest way I found to prevent stretching on textures.

I used this map as a base to do the bump and spec map.

The shirt texture was done using a simple fabric texture I found on the internet and painted the details. The coat and hat textures were done procedurally with the same fabric texture used for the shirt as a base.

For the shading, I used the Mental Ray skin shader for the head and hand and the Arch&Design for the clothing. Not much to say expect that it’s really important to take some time to test the different options of the shaders to really get what you want. When starting work on a new shader I always deactivate everything and put every parameter back on zero and play with them one at a time, even on shaders I know and have already used. This way I can really test out everything again and make sure I know what I’m doing. I remember when I first started 3D, it was a real pain for me to do shader work but now, I really enjoy it.