Then I used a 3d painter to refine the details. For this I am giving preference to Bodypaint. Its structure looks similar to Photoshop especially with the layers management, the tools and its compatibility with the psd format. Because it gives a good feedback with high quality display, I like to use Bodypaint to adjust the seams and add subtle details. This accuracy is appreciable for sensitive area such as lips and eyes makeup which can be separated within layers as well. Obviously, the pores of the skin have specific properties from one area to another. I had to pick up different type of references to recover fine details. I didn’t hesitate to use a reference from an Asian woman to get more bumps with the neck. Actually I tackle this problem like a puzzle game. Anything lack of details is saved with another piece of reference I copy and paste into it. Then the properties of the layers turn into luminosity, overlay or soft light (etc) provide a good way to blend them together. The essential thing is to have constant tones of skin everywhere so that it won’t alter the shadows or lighting when rendering.

I create the new layers to add more wrinkles around the eye, more freckles and so on and so forth. I isolate each type of feature as much as I can, in this way I could adjust their intensity with the layer later if needed. As I’m using a psd file, I can switch from Photoshop to body paint to have the advantages of each of these packages.

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Once I’m happy with the color map, I hide the superficial layer (makeup, freckles…) and generate the bump map from the blue channel of the color map. Briefly, due to skin properties and its light transmission, this channel provides most of the information we need for this purpose. The Dodge tool is quite nice to adjust the contrast and sebum with the specular map.

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I tried almost all plug-in’s within Maya to generate hair. Shave & Haircut stand for the most intuitive and powerful commercial tool. It’s rib export is work pretty well for renderman compliants. I believe rendering hair with mental ray is too resource hungry and time consuming compare to renderman.

I created guides for the eyebrows, hair and some parts of the hair close to the ears that needs more control. Grayscale textures help me to give information with the thickness and density at the root.

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I generate the hair just on one side of the head as i’m creating only what is seen. The hair count and hair segment is pretty high, but renderman can handle this without suffer. I use quite often the « comb using curves » option which is efficient to obtain the right shape of the hairs very quickly. It is a good start to rough the haircut then brushes like translate and puff is a good support for grooming.

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Lighting and Rendering



There is very few lights in the scene, the directions of them are pretty straight. Depending of the style I’m looking for, two direct lights are just enough for this purpose. The area light will provides an accurate soft shadow with primitive rectangle. These shadows are generating in raytracing. This will give a nice interaction with the skin and the ribbon for instance.

The regard of the character leads to a point outside the canvas. I gave a representation of the target with a second light source which is a point light. It draws the silhouette of the character out of the dark background. The positioning of this light will pop out the pilosity on the skin that I’ll add at the end of the process. The principal lights added, the global illumination is active to bring more realism to the scene. The shadows get more diffused and the lights aren’t seemed to come from two directions anymore. I keep it subtle so that we still feel the studio’s lighting.

I decide to render with mental ray then I convert my file texture in *.map format to optimize the renders. The outputs are in float bits to enhance in order to get more range for the compositing.
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Compositing

Here we can see most of the passes used for the final compositing. The final output has been desaturated to obtain a black and white tint. And finally the image is completed.

Hope you liked the explanation of techniques used in this image. Thanks for reading, please send me your queries and comments.

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