Making of The Last Elf by Piotr Fox Wysocki, Poland


Q. Will you tell me something about texturing, lighting and rendering in this scene?

Texturing - I create all the textures alone and I use few pictures from different directions and after UV’s job, I just project them on to the face, bake them to the texture and stitch them in Photoshop. Clean, remove shadows, etc… As I remember I had 5 or 6 projected pics. I used mental ray fast skin shader. To create cloth I used Maya cloth, and Maya fur. As far as I remember there were 1300 000 small hair in the fabric. Also tiny hair on the face, but I don't remember right now how much.



Lighting - There were 2 spot lights. One on the face, with leaf gobo. Second light, from behind as the back light. For HDRI maps I use just jpegs, on box. When I was working on it was winter, so I couldn’t do my own pics. So I found some pictures of forest and I place them on cube.



Rendering - I use Maya mental ray, with final gathering. To have quick feedback I just project rendering result on cloth and bake it to the texture, for faster rendering in high resolutions.

When I finish face shader setup I bake it for the face so I could work really fast on eyes, brooch, helmet, eyelashes, cloth fur, peach fuzz on the face and also I freeze final gathering results. For final rendering I leave just backed cloth, and rest was calculated. Final rendering in 3k takes around 2 hours on my system (Pentium 4 3.4Ghz HT, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon x850xt, Dell 24 inch monitor). Have a look at my rendering settings.




Long story short, I tried to do everything exactly as it is in the real life.  Hope some of you enjoy this making. :)