CGArena

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 3 JUNE - JULY 2008

Get Attention in the Computer Graphics Community

INTERVIEW
Dario Lanza
GALLERY 3DSMAX
Latest 3d inspiring art Making of Cultural Heritage of Ancient India
PHOTOSHOP ZBRUSH
Spring Break Making ofSculpture
AFTER EFFECTS MAYA
Painting to Reveal Layer Modeling Morgane
 05 Interview
Dario Lanza

14 Photoshop
Spring Break

20 After Effects
Painting to Reveal Layer

24 3ds Max
Making of Cultural Heritage of Ancient India

40 ZBrush
Making of Sculpture

51 Maya
Modeling Morgane

63 Gallery
Showcase of latest 3d art

Magazine Edited: Ashish Rastogi

Magazine Cover Image: Nitin.D.Mahale, India

Page 2 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 industry news
nPower Software’s received turbo iZ3D Selected to Join Microsoft
performance boost with v5.0 release Startup Accelerator Program

nPower Software’s popular Power iZ3D, LLC, designer, developer, and marketer of ad-
NURBS, Power Translators, and vanced 3D visualization systems, is pleased to announce
Power Solids products received a that it has been selected to join the Microsoft Startup
turbo charged performance boost Accelerator Program. Stewarded by the Emerging Busi-
with the version 5.0 release. This ness Team (EBT) at Microsoft Corp., the program is de-
5.0 version dramatically improves signed to connect high-potential startups committed to
productivity and design through- the Microsoft platform to an extensive support network
put by significantly optimizing the that provides access to Microsoft people and programs.
most common operations used in
virtually all of the commands. “We are pleased that Microsoft acknowledges the emer-
Power Translators, Power NURBS and Power Solids 5.0 gence of 3D as a viable trend for immersive gaming, com-
now also take advantage of modern multi-processor ar- puter design and home theater purposes. Through our se-
chitectures with multi-threaded tessellation. Version 5.0 lection into the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program
also supports much larger models (especially for import- we are hoping to work closely with Microsoft to expose
ing) due to a reduced memory footprint. With version more consumers to the thrill of the stereoscopic 3D ex-
5.0, you can work on larger models, get the job finished perience through our 22-inch widescreen 3D monitors,”
significantly faster, with fewer obstacles, and have more remarked Thomas Striegler, CEO of iZ3D, LLC.
fun doing it.

ZBrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting - ZBrush’s

popularity is exploding giving more CG artists the power to create stunning digital
art with a distinctively fine art feel. ZBrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital
Book

Sculpting is the must-have guide to creating highly detailed, lush, organic models
using the revolutionary ZBrush software. Digital sculptor Scott Spencer guides
you through the full array of ZBrush tools, including brushes, textures and detail-
ing. You’ll gain inspiration and insight from the beautiful full-color illustrations
and professional tips from experienced ZBrush artists included in the book. ISBN:
978-0-470-24996-3

Unreal VFX: Material Transitions - In this demonstration the instructor

goes into depth on how to create a material that can transition from one set of
Training

textures and parameters, into another. He also gets into how to make a character
completely dissolve away. Once the materials are setup, the instructor goes into
how to control them in Cascade, Kismet, and Matinee. While inside Matinee,
you learn how to time the dissolve to match the animation, and also how to swap
entire materials and allow the character to dissolve after he has transformed
from stone to real life. Price of the DVD is $59.95 and download for $49.95

Page 3 Issue 3 June - July 2008

Your Best Opportunity This Year to Reach
the Dynamic Digital Media Audience in Asia.
The first SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive
Techniques in Asia opens in Singapore on 10 December 2008. SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 will be a
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Singapore Skyline photo courtesy of Singapore Tourism Board

The 1st ACM SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia
CONFERENCE 10 – 13 DECEMBER 2008
E X H I B I T I O N 11 – 13 DECEMBER 2008
SUNTEC SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION AND EXHIBITION CENTRE
 interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH
Dario Lanza
Q. Hello Dario, could you tell us a bit about yourself, location
etc.?

Hello. I’m engineer, but I found that digital imaginary was my

passion. Then, I studied photography and film making in Madrid,
and started working as graphic designer at the advertising agency
BBDO. Working there, I found 3D imaginary and that changed
everything...

Q. Were you trained in 3D or self taught?

My first step in 3D was self taught and trying an old version of 3D

Studio max. I apply for working on an advertising campaign for a
well-known Spanish gin. After that, I decided to improve my 3D skills and I began a Master course at Aula Tematica,
the big Spanish Training Center, where after years I found myself working as 3D Instructor for people like me years
before.

Page 5 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH
Dario Lanza
Q. Have you done any work on the films live set? Please share the experience and any obstacles face.

My only work on film till today was for a 2D animation film, where I was integrating 3D animations and characters
over 2D footage. The main obstacle, as always, was the tight deadlines, but I met great artist there and I found this as
a very enriching experience.

Q. What’s the reason of choosing Lightwave as your main 3d program and what changes you like to see/recom-
mend in the future versions?

The main reason for choosing Lightwave was its amazing quality and speed of render. With FPrime you can see real-
time results, even with radiosity or complex illumination. No more time-consuming waiting to see if this texture is
looking good or not. This changed our way of working forever. I find that real-time feedback is the future of the tools
for 3D imaginary. The speed and ease of model was another important asset to choose Lightwave. I would like to see
some changes in character setup and animation, and why not some improvements in fluids.

Q. Do you do any preliminary drawings before you model, or do you just start and see what happens and how long
on average would you spend on an image?

Lots of drawings and sketches are always necessary in my work. I never start modeling before having a very close idea

Page 8 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH
Dario Lanza
of what I’m looking for. We must never forget that computer is only the tool but the artist process works as always: from
the idea to the sketch and after dozens of sketches you can plan the final piece. This is the only clue for success.

Naturally, more the complex image is, the longer it takes, but an average illustration is lasting about ten days approx.
from the idea to the post produced final render.

Page 9 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH
Dario Lanza
Q. Do you think sketching is necessary for the 3d Artist or is there any other way round?

Preproduction and sketching are indispensable for the 3D artist, just like search of references, research and look devel-
opment. With a good preproduction, you get half the illustration finished. The other half is the execution itself, but this
is a more mechanic work.

Q. How’s the CG industry and scope in Spain? Your government helps in any way for the growth of the animation
industry?

In Spain, the CG industry is starting. There is no help from the government and our cinema industry has not enough
special Fx or animation films. This is the reason why so many excellent cg Spanish professionals working all around the
world on the greatest studios, but some working in our country. But this is finally changing, and now there are a few
studios that are helping to grow it up, and I think that there is a very interesting future for our industry and our cinema
here. I hope so.

Page 10 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 interview

AN INTERVIEW WITH
Dario Lanza
Q. If you could create yourself as any 3D character whether it’s in a game or a
film who would it be?

Hmmmm... This is a very funny question. I think I choose Gandalf, this is a very
cool character, don’t you think?

Q. What are your hobbies, and where you see yourself after 5 years?

My hobbies are music (I’m bass player), photography, designing and film. I see
myself in the future working on a university, helping to research and developing
this exciting art-technique. I enjoy teaching and developing, so I think this is
my perfect job. I will combine it with a bit of production and creative work. You
need to feed your creative soul anyway...

Q. What is one piece of advice you would give to any artist looking to get into 3D?

Have Patience, if you don’t get what you’re looking for, try another way. Be always alert, the real world is full of subtle
tiny details you must be aware. Study and look for inspiration in the classics and work of other artists. Then you can de-
fine your own style as you like it. In this job, you must never stop learning, but the reward will make it worth. Be sure.

Q. On which projects you are working these days, and which project you enjoying the most?

These days I’m busy with the projects of the students and the classes, but I’m waiting to have a little time to make an
illustration I have in mind. I can only say that it will be a reconstruction of the ancient life.

Q. Anything you like to add? It is your chance now to state your opinion about anything.

Congratulations to a lot of great artists out there. I’m always learning from them and they are a real reference for my
work. I would like to be reference for others like those are for me. Don’t you think we have the best job in the world?

Thanks a lot Dario for your time. Best Wishes for future.
Thank you, Good luck and Congratulations for this wonderful magazine.
Website: www.dariolanza.com

Page 11 Issue 3 June - July 2008

Artwork By: Dario Lanza
 by Kriss Skorjanec
Email: [email protected]

Spring Break
 photoshop

Usually we soften portraits, but not this time. We are going to crack it up. Big time..

Step 1: Open the image in Photoshop and duplicate it. Now set the new layer to Linear Dodge. This gives our portrait
more vivid colors.

Step 2: Let’s get even more Contrast and Dynamic. Create a new Adjustment layer „ curves „ . Make sure you have
the Channel set to RGB and slightly give the Contrast a little Boost.

Step 3: To add more Contrast hold down the [ALT] Key and click in
the layers window between the Curves layer and the layer beneath ( in
our case it’s called Layer 1 )

Page 15 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 photoshop

Step 4: Okay. Now starts the fun part of our project. Let’s take our texture and place it in our PS document right on
top of the other layers. Set the layer mode to multiply.

Step 5: Now we want to get rid of the red colors in our work. That’s an easy one. We go Just beneath our texture layer
and add another Adjustment layer. Create a new Adjustment layer -> Hue/ Saturation. Now take the Saturation down
to -100.

Page 16 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 photoshop
Step 6: Adding shadows. To make our work look more 3D we will
have to boost the shadows, espacially in the mouth and between the
theeth and the upper lip.

For this I like to work on a layer, that contents all the visual layers be-
neath, just like a screenshot. That gives you even another advantage:
you can adjust the intensity of the shadows with the opacity of that
layer. Make sure you have the top layer selected. Hold down [shift]
+ [Ctrl] + [alt] press [N] , then [E]. That will give you a layer that
contains all the other visible layers.

Step 7: Select the Burn tool [O]. Range: Midtones. Exposure: 10

– 20 %. Choose a round brush with soft edges and start burning up
the shadows. The blue lines show you where you should boost the
shadows.

Step 8: To get more life in our picture we can give more color to our
grass. So let’s add another Adjustment layer on top of our composition.
New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/ Saturation. Instead of Edit: Master we
choose -> Edit: Greens. And now we increase the Saturation for about +
20.

Page 17 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 photoshop

Step 9: Well, we did it. Now we can flatten the image and
sharpen it up a little. After the flattening we go to Filter ->
Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask....

The settings you choose depends on what you want to do with

your project. If you want to print it, i recommend to sharpen
it a bit more than it looks perfect on your screen.

Now your effect is complete, I hope you have enjoyed this

tutorial.

by Kriss Skorjanec
[email protected]

Page 18 Issue 3 June - July 2008

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 after effects

Paint i ng to Rev e a l L ayer

by Suzane Smith, Canada
Email: [email protected]

Quite often, you will not use Paint to directly create visible strokes; instead, you will use Paint to reveal other layers
you’ve already created. This can give the impression that you are “painting on” more complex imagery. This trick will be
the focus of this tutorial

Step 1: Create composition and import the image on which you like to paint. Remember for this tutorial creates an
alpha channel in the image using Photoshop. Create a selection around the object in Photoshop and press create alpha
button in the channels panel. Save the image as tga, tiff or any other format which can keep alpha channel not jpeg,
gif, bmp.

Page 20 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 after effects
Step 2: Drag the new image in the composition. To reveal an image, its layer has to start off invisible, and then gradu-
ally be revealed over time. Painting on an invisible layer isn’t very easy, though – so you’ll make the layer transparent in
a later step. Change the Workspace to Paint. Start by painting in its new alpha channel.

Step 3: Double click on the image to open it in its layer panel. Click on Show
Channel icon at the bottom of the Layer panel and select Alpha.

Step 4: Select the Brush tool. In the Paint panel, check that Opacity and Flow
are both set to 100%. Set the Foreground color to white. Set Mode to Normal and
Channels to Alpha

Step 5: Set the Duration popup to Write On. The Write On option automatically sets the keyframes for the stroke’s
End parameter. Adjust the brush tip as per the image requirement.

Step 6: You are at starting of the composition 00:00, paint from the bottom up in one continuous stroke over the
course of a few seconds. When you release the mouse, the paint stroke will disappear. This is because Write On auto-
matically created keyframes for End, starting at End = 0%. If you’re not happy with the stroke, Undo and try again.

Page 21 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 after effects

Step 7: Select the layer and Press F3 to open Effects control panel. Check the Paint on transparent option On. The
remaining problem is that the original alpha has been replaced with the paint stroke. To retrieve it, apply Effect >
Channels > Set Matte. Leave the options at default, this way your strokes also not override other things in image and
strokes don’t go outside your alpha channel in the image.

RAM Preview it and your effect is completed and this technique you can use in creating very complex effects. If you
create something using this technique then please don’t forget to show me.

by Suzane Smith, Canada

[email protected]

Page 22 Issue 3 June - July 2008

Cultural Heritage of
Ancient India
by Nitin.D.Mahale, India
Email: [email protected]
 3ds max

Hi friends, my name is Nitin.D.Mahale and may be you all know that I made this piece for CGArena “Ancient Times”
3D Challenge sponsored by iZ3D, Pixologic, Craft Animations, Polyboost, ambientLight, Hyperfocal Design, Noesis
Interactive and N-sided, I won the first prize in this challenge. I would like to thank CGArena for arranging this
wonderful challenge and allowing upcoming artists like us to show some skills and learn from it. So, this is a great op-
portunity for me to show the process of making this theme come into life.

First of all I would like to give some introduction about the concept and the inspiration of the theme.

Inspiration/Concept

I have always been fantasized about the Architecture of India and the Era of the time when the Kings and their king-
dom. I especially love Rajput architecture, at that era near about 8th - 10th century they build many beautiful palaces
and setup their kingdoms at places like Ajmer, Jaipur, Udaipur, Ujjain etc; I always used to portray the kind of environ-
ment where they stayed, obviously their great palaces and the beautiful surrounding around them. This was the greatest
inspiration I got and rest was my imagination helped me in following the concept.

Page 25 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max
References

Page 26 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max
Modeling

Modeling is the part I really enjoyed doing, as I love complex modeling and maintaining the proportions as it is, for
the proportions I just imagined the floor size and started meshing accordingly. Here u can see started on the modeling
process of the entire Udaipur palace building, using the reference picture as a background, also maintaining the propor-
tions and modeling with box, spheres, splines and arcs I got what I want. There is nothing fancy in modeling things;
normal poly modeling at some stages is very useful.

So, here is my basic mesh of the side building. I already decided to build this in two parts, the side building and main
building, for main building I got some reference picture from internet, the modeling process is as seen here. After
spending some time on complex meshing on the buildings, I am pretty satisfied with the modeling there, and its time
to show some environment add-ons such as trees, water and other necessary models to add and beautify the scene to
get the desired look as planned.

Page 27 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max

Tree

Therefore, started to model some trees around, because I never modeled any of these before, it was my 1st attempt.
Started with a cylinder with specific segments(10 each), convert to edit-poly, extrude, bevel and move some vertices
to get the tree trunk kind of look, apply mesh smooth and there it is, u got the trunk there, if its too smooth then try
to chamfer some edges and adjust it however you want. Ok, now for the leaves, refer to the Scatter tutorial we get in
Autodesk 3ds Max Help section, its pretty easy and can be done within minutes, or you can follow other method of
Particle system which I did, here it follows, select Pcloud under Particle Systems, drag it as per the branches of the tree
and then make a small place with leaf texture applied with
opacity map and keep aside which be our source to scatter
around the Pcloud; under Pcloud there will be pick object
where we have to pick the same plane(leaf ) and set pcloud
to sphere emitter with viewport display of mesh, under
particle type select instanced
geometry and under instanc-
ing parameters pick object the
same leaf plane, that will give
the exact amount of leaves
around the branches, later play
in particle generation which
will give the control of the
leaves and its size etc, that’s it.
Copy, scale and arrange around
the branches of the trunk as
per the desired look!

Page 28 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max
Stones/Rocks

It’s quite simple, for this take a sphere radius 600mm with default segments, anyways it can be increased later as per
desired simulation, then apply Noise modifier with fractal option checked on, and strength X, Y to 75 and Z to 50 or
as per need, then convert to Edit poly and move some bunch of polys here and there to get stone kind a look and apply
mesh smooth modifier, that’s it, applied texture with little displacement and rocks are ready to add in the scene!

Stone Map which is used on above

textured stones

Diya

It’s a simple lathe modeling, scaled, skewed, applied FFD Box and played
around the shape until it I got the desired look, selected the upper polys
and applied Floral texture whichever looked nicer, & for the flame, I surfed
through internet and got a good looking flame image, which I edited in Pho-
toshop and also made opacity map, placed a plane at the edge of the Diya and
added VRayMTLwrapper to the flame material to spread some light around
itself, & there was my beautiful Diya!

Page 29 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max

Flame Material and Settings -- >

Boat

Modeling done using bevel profile for the boat shaped

spline, added necessary stuff to look it more old of its kind,
apply nice wood texture and I got what I want.

Textured Boat Wireframe of the Boat

Page 30 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max
Mashaal (Light Torch)

Good reference from internet helped me to get the accurate shape of the mashaal, modeled it accord-
ingly following the shape and got exactly the same, applied nice rusted metal texture to it and got the
rusty kinder look. For the flames, I tried 2 types of them, one is with sphere gizmo under Atmospheric
apparatus and other with same trick I did for diya, image with opacity map, and wrapped around with
planes on the mashaal.

Page 31 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max
Flag

This was quite simpler, yet it was my first time and I really enjoyed doing this, because this was done with the help of
the Flag tutorial from default Autodesk 3ds Max Help section there was no major errors as I followed the tutorial as it
is and played little around the parameters and got the look what I wanted.

ith sufficient amount of segments, added little noise of about X, Y, Z – 50, noise map in both diffuse and bump with
20-30 or as desired, on right page there is the material with settings.

Now, everything’s done and I started

merging all the stuff and placing it
in there respective positions where
they should be, so, here is the scene
without textures.

Page 32 Issue 3 June - July 2008

Texturing

Finally my modeling is done and models

were ready for texturing but I am not a great
fan of texturing, anyways I had to do it, so I
decided to go for it and collected some nice
textures from my library. Not sure whether
which will look good, as you can see in the
references palace, there is entire single flat
paint flowed to it, so I decided to keep it
that way and applied nice marble texture to
it and kept it as it, somehow after some test
with rough lighting I finally managed to give
proper textures to entire models therein.
 3ds max

Lighting

This is the most wonderful part

of the entire theme and also the
trickiest, as u all know that light-
ing plays an important part in
bringing things to life! And I really
enjoyed doing this the most, I had
planned accordingly and also had
portrayed the look of the moon-
light in a calm and beautiful at-
mosphere, where it should feel like
everybody is retired and is sleep-
ing. So, the entire environment
should look peaceful and pleasant.
For this scene I chose V-ray as my
renderer, as it gives better result
than any other Rendering engine,
according to my experiments!

So, I have to create a moonlight

effect, for that, the moon light
should be felt throughout with
its blue tint and as I had planned
of the night scene, I modeled the
mashaal to get the warmer look
as well where the light will fall on
the walls of the palace and make it
look much natural, which also the
theme suggested as in olden days
there were no light bulbs or any so
this was the better idea. Here u can
see the scene with lights placement
and light settings accordingly.

Page 34 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 VraySun

Direct Light Direct Light Vray Light Omni Light

 3ds max
Rendering

So, everything including lighting is done and I am very happy about the results I got; now I have to render it in high
settings, I decided to go for 3000+ pixels which also I can print. Here are the settings for the same.

Page 36 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 3ds max
Post Production

This was the final step of the render, and also important too. I have some nice skies in my library, picked some of them
and blended them within each other with some stars and moon which I got from internet, and created my own version
of nice moonlight sky!

Then, the scene was ready and to give a more fantasized look, played with hue-saturation, color corrected and added a
little bit of bluish tint with slight yellow highlights which will give colder as well as warmer look to the entire scene.
Now, the image is a bit sharp and I wanted a kind of dreamy look so added some Gaussian blur to the scene of around
10% and there it is my final version is ready to upload!

Hope you all enjoyed the tutorial as much as I enjoyed it writing, if there is any thing more u want to know or any
feedback’s, you are free to ask or mail me on [email protected] & [email protected]

Again, I thank CGArena for giving me chance to explain the process and making this tutorial, Happy rendering to
all!

About the Artist

My name is Nitin.D.Mahale; basically I am from India (Mumbai).I have been in this field for past 5 years, I graduated
with Bachelors of commerce degree and have no base of Arts or any of such streams. I love working on large projects,
especially lighting, creating environments as you can see it’s the best part in my work, and I just love it!

Page 38 Issue 3 June - July 2008

see it...capture it...

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 by Ralph Reinle, Turkey
Email: [email protected]

Making of Sculpture
 zbrush
Introduction

Being a 3D enthusiast for many years, I’m always watching closely the CG communities and forums for inspiration
and information. I find the workshops, running in some of those communities/forums, especially at CGTalk.com, a
wonderful opportunity as learning experiences and pushing the artists’ skills further. The only problem I usually have,
working full time and doing my fine art bachelor degree, is finding time to participate of such workshops. But one
in particular that picked my attention was the 3D Sculpting Workshop – Motion, at CGTalk moderated by Rebecca
Kimmel. There were some suggestions that we could pick from. I saw the Corneille Van Clève’s Polyphemus Sculpture
and I thought that would be a great exercise to start with. At that time I had done only some tutorials and modeled a
bust on Zbrush. So I didn’t know that much of Zbrush and this project was a real challenge.

Since it was one of my first’s models I learned a lot, but had done lots of mistakes that I wouldn’t do in the same way
today.

References

The first step for me is always to look for as many ref-

erence pictures as I can get, from all sides I can find. I
found these at the site of the Louvre: Click Here.

Page 41 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 zbrush
Basemesh

The basemesh was a kind of Frankenstein. I picked parts from different models I had done in the past in Maya and
started putting all together. I had a poly hand that looked beautiful in Maya, but later on I realized that, because of
the so many details on the fingernails I had modeled in Maya, it brought me a lot of trouble in Zbrush. So if I have an
advice would be, if you start with basemeshes, start it simple.

Pose your Model First

Another mistake that made me lost a lot of time, was trying to pose the model AFTER I had done some details. He
had a complicated pose and it was very time consuming trying to adapt what I had already detailed in the right pose.
Even the hand is important to be positioned first before detailing it.

Page 42 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 zbrush

A good tip is trying to pose him at the very beginning with the basemesh at level 1, or, if the pose is too complicated,
maybe trying to use some maquette models just to experiment and find the right pose of your model. At Ryan King-
slay’s blog Sculpt. Paint. Create. there are some great maquette models to download.

Detailing the Hair and Beard

Another issue that I had was the amount of

detail on the beard and hair. Because I was
using a basemesh with a head that I’ve done
in the old fashion way, in other words bald,
when I started detailing those areas the res-
olution was not enough and if I had subdi-
vided the whole mesh once more, the total
poly count would be too high. The solution
I got was to subdivide only the regions of
the hair and beard and the rest of the mesh
was hidden. The resulted mesh was not re-
ally what I wanted but it did the trick. I
think the best solution is to predict where
you will have more details in your mesh and
prepare a basemesh with this in mind.

Page 43 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 zbrush
Modeling and Detailing

There is actually no secret for the rest of the modeling and detailing. It’s just a game of patience and observation. I
picked a subject with lot of details and props. So you can’t really do it fast because at some point, after hours looking at
the object, my eyes started getting tired and you didn’t see the things right. When that happened, I stopped and tried
again the next day. Take your time!

After finished the render, now I ready to

composite the renders in XSI. In this ses-
sion I only used 3 render pass, they are color
pass (with shadow), ambient occlusion pass
and specular pass. The Alpha pass I used it
later in Photoshop for color correction and
other tweaking.

Page 44 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 zbrush
Exporting and Rendering

Well that was probably the most time consuming and boring task of the whole project. For one side because I had to
learn all the technical aspect of bringing the details from Zbrush to an external 3D package (the one I chose was 3ds-
max because I wanted to render with Vray), the other side because I couldn’t find a well documented default procedure
for rendering the details on the low-res model. I had to do a lot of tests and searched all over the place for information.
I only found my way when I saw a thread at Zbrushcentral.com that the artist was exporting the mesh in a mid-level
resolution and using normal maps instead of displacement maps. The material and light setup was very basic.

That’s it and my final image is ready, in upcoming pages check out the model from different angle and close up.

Page 45 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 winners
In Feb2008-Apr2008, your mission was to create a 3d image on the theme “Ancient Times” and spon-
sored by Pixologic, Craft Animations, iZ3d, N-Sided, Hyperfocal Design, ambientLight, Polyboost
and Noesis Interactive.

Nitin.D.Mahale, India First Prize - $7323USD

[email protected]
Christopher ADAJAR, France
Second Prize- $1164 USD
[email protected]

Sponsors
modeling morgane
by Cousigne Adrien
Email: [email protected]
 maya

Concept, Sketch and References

My first step was to find a great design for the character as it was suppose to be the main character of a short movie.
Therefore I worked on several models and different graphic styles in order to find the best visual aspect.

Page 52 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya

Later on, after eventually finding a satisfying aspect I pushed the rough in Corel Painter which was my final choice.

Modeling

An interesting aspect about this character is its simplicity just a sphere and a cone. I started the modeling part and put
some “splines” in maya for the face’s contours to visualize all the details.

Page 53 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya
I often use nurbs and I distort it in order to find the right shapes because it is more flexible than the polygons.

I first try to find the right shape then I did the overlines and finally transform it in polygon and add some more de-
tails.

http://aaron-cds.cgsociety.org/gallery/

Page 54 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya

It is easy to draw the body, the hands and the legs.

As regards to the hair, it is fixing to the back of her head by a “helix” which means that this part is fussy to realize. I
started to create a “very low poly” model and then I added the details to the base of the “helix” and also add a temples
tomb like thing.

Page 55 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya
After putting all parts together it gives me image like...

Page 56 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya

Her teddy bear was expected to have several scars in order to show the bad treatment it suffered throughout the years. It
spend all the time with the little girl therefore I thought of putting stitches on its joints and give him a stitched smile.

This smile gives a weird feeling when looking at the bear. The basic forms are really simple to model.

Page 57 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya
The difficult part was to model the sewing thread which links all the body parts together.

I just created holes on both forms and an “extrude” on

a small cube to model the sewing thread following the
“path” of a “spline”. This makes my modeling completes.

Page 58 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya
Texturing and Rendering- The texturing and rendering was not pushed really far for now. I made the rendering in
mental-ray with a special pass render of occlusion.

Page 59 Issue 3 June - July 2008

 maya

Occlusion Pass

Beauty Pass

Page 60 Issue 3 June - July 2008

That’s all. Thanks for reading and hope you liked the details given.

Cousigne Adrien
[email protected]
gallery
Baphometh
Robin Benes, Czech Republic
[email protected]
3ds Max, ZBrush, Brazil, Photoshop
Frog Toy
Daniil V. Alikov, Russia
[email protected]
Maya, Zbrush
Church of Calatravas
Cesar Martinez Alvaro, Espa
[email protected]
3ds mx, Photoshop, Combustion
Dragon
Cheong Hoe Yi, Malaysia
[email protected]
Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop
House
M.Serhat Uzel, Turkey
[email protected]
3ds Max, Vue 6
Mountains and Aliens
Benoit Patterlini, France
[email protected]
Lightwave
Subway
Volkan Kacar, Turkey
[email protected]
3ds max, Mental Ray
 BB Gun
Ongie Ongushi, Thailand
[email protected]
3ds Max

Plane
Bichoo.Rahul.Ramanan, India
[email protected]
3ds Max, Photoshop
Another House
Keo Studio, France
[email protected]
3ds Max
 submission

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