Making of Super Snailby Andrés Hurtado, Spain


As for the helmet, at the beginning I wasn’t sure about it. I was afraid it could make the nice face of the snail less important, but once it was placed properly all doubt disappeared. Not only did it not make the face less important, but also it added a quirky touch.

The helmet is a sphere changed by means of cuts and extrusions. On the sides of the opening some polygons were triangular, which made an effect of imperfection on the model, but this was easily solved when textured, so I didn’t worry about it. Anyway the rounded side of “padding” which outlines the opening of the helmet also helps to diminish that unwanted effect. The eyes are just spheres set in the hollows of the antennae.


The engine is a free model downloaded from the internet to which I added many details and corrected some imperfections. Afterwards I put it into a HyperNURBS so that the edges would round and so get a wearing away effect in all the pieces of the engine.



The metal sheet on which the engine is lying is a choice of polygons from the shell which I separated from it and gave volume by distorting it and adding dents to it etc, to stress the wearing away effect caused by use and pass of time.Both the shime on the opening of the shell and on the body and floor are made by means of sweepa NURBS distorted with different thicknesses. The sticky stuff is EPS’s imported from Freehand.



Texturing

This is the part I enjoyed the most, I really like experimenting with textures and also, as you are fitting them is when the work really comes into life. Personally I think a poor modeling can be improved a lot by means of texturing.


To make the texture of the snail I had to be very patient. The first step was the UV mapping in BodyPaint of the body, then using a real photograph of a snail as a starting point I cloned parts in different layers which I modified afterwards, changing size, orientation, etc.