Making of the Princeby Robert Vari, Hungary Web: www.robertvari.com


Layout and Lighting

I prefer to do the lighting first. I assemble the models and setup the lighting for the scene before I get into the shaders. You won't be able to do the shading properly without lighting. I started with maya light setups but I didn't really like what I was getting. Then I found an HDRI sunset image in my collection, so I tried it using only the Mental Ray IBL node. I was instantly satisfied with the result. This sunset mood was just what the piece needed. Using an HDRI image for lighting turned out to be a great choice for reflections also. Two flies with one blow... as the frog would say :-) Did a few experiments with camera angles and lens setting, but I wasn't going for a final shot just now.



Materials and Shading

I started on the frog first. I put together a Mental Ray shading group using the textures generated by ZBrush, with a miss_fast_shader generating the light map and a mia_material_x responsible for the characteristic wet frog skin look. With the rocks I used an occlusion map to control specularity so that the rock would look wetter as their surface got closer to the water. For the water surface I used maya's built-in water texture and a mia_material_x shader to help me get a realistic water effect.



Done (or is it?)

After the first full renders of the scene, I felt it wasn't enough. Lighting was good, the frogs model and the materials were working, but the background was empty. As I mentioned earlier I'm into nature photography, so I thought this experience could help me out with this. I created some PaintEffect grass in the background and between the rocks, and converted it into geometry because I was using Mental Ray for rendering. After tweeking some shaders the grass was done. While I was messing about with the background my wife suggested that a water lily would look great on the water. I wholeheartedly agreed with her. Using some basic shapes I started on the water lily.



After it was done I setup its shaders in the fully lit scene so it would match the setting well. Then I got the idea that I could turn the frog into the well known fairytale prince if I put a crown on his head. With just a bit of extra work I could do it, so I went ahead modeled a simple geometry, detailed it a bit in ZBrush to make it more fancy and I had my crown. I used the mia_material for the crown too.