Making of Super Snailby Andrés Hurtado, Spain


The texture of the engine is a very reflecting material with different valves of colored ambient occlusion applied in almost all the channels, bump, color, reflection, specular, etc, mixed with other black textures in a channel alpha to which I added noise and a lot of specular to get a greasy rusty and muddy effect for the lower part of the engine.





The eyes are a circular color gradient with a high specular and reflection.


For the helmet I used a paper (film) which I torn, scratched, stamped on it, wrinkled, got it dirty and then scanned it and made it into black and white with high contrast, I inverted it and applied it to a red texture in the channel alpha, I added a little noise and a high value of ambient occlusion. The number and the lighting are another overlapped texture.


Lighting

I normally use quite a lot of light sources; I place them so I can highlight details of the scene. In this image I have used 13 lights: 4 omni lights as ambient lighting, 2 to highlight  the form of the engine, 3 spotlights to highlight the back of the engine, 3 highlight to stress the specular and the greasy effect on the shell, a spotlight behind the snail neck for the sub surface scattering, in addition to the sun with area shade and the sky with a HDRI with an atmosphere similar to the photograph of the road for the global lighting I have used a surface with an asphalt texture for the floor and the yellow lines only to be reflected on the engine and to add some radiosity to the snail body and shine.




Post-Production

A very important part of this piece was the postproduction, which I carried out in Photoshop. For the background of this image, I made the final render activating the render multipass in a lot of channels so to have them separately in layers afterwards. This is useful to be able to work on each channel independently in Photoshop so that I have more control for the integration of the render on the photograph. So I had the specular, the layer for each light and another layer for the ambient occlusion. This way you get a very wide control on each channel and you are able to adjust the image as precisely as possible.