Concepting/Introduction :

Dark Knight`s revenge is a tribute made just for fun to one of my favourite DC`s superheroes.
The main source of inspiration , apart the general imaginary of Batman`s comics, movies and so on was the wonderful short
movie “Batman : Dead End” by Sandy Collora. You can check out what I`m talking about just following this link :
http://www.collorastudios.com/projects/bde/bdemain.htm
I loved Sandy`s realistic vision of Batman`s costume and the dark and dirt mood of the film, so I decided to keep that realistic
aspect in 3D emphatizing even more Bruce Wayne`s dark side.So I took here and there elements from Batman`s iconography
assembling them according to my personal tastes of how I like him.
I choosed to not have a traditional beefy batman , but I preferred a more athletic and slim body. The blood on his weapon was
meant to strength the “revenge” idea , because the very first idea of me was that he had a weapon in one hand and the joker`s
head in another…but I abandoned soon that because too much goorish, but the blooded weapon still remain to suggest the
“revenge”.
The first step I did was to quickly conceptualize in Photoshop the overall mood of the final picture, the pose and the
background, I wanted him to look like in anger, kind of desperate at the end of a brutal fight. I even wanted to not depict h im in
the traditional dark blueish mood and hidden by shadows we`ve seen in movies and comics , preferring more a dramatic
contrast between warm reddish/orange tones and cold blue/purple tones ,putting him in direct light to best display all the ip er
realistic details I wanted to show.

Modelling :

I started to model the batman in neutral pose with subdivision p olygonal modelling tecnique in 3D Studio Max 7.0 . Of course I
took a lot of anatomic references first, to help me with proportions and detail of the body and many others for the batman
costumes/gear. I took some nice body and faces references from www.3d.sk and decided to give him a phisionomy in between
of Michael Keaton and Val kilmer .

The first step of modelling was already pretty detailed, but I wanted it to push it to be even further, so I decided to do all the
fine detail (wrinkles, costume bump and such) in zbrush and to let max render all this detail in the form of normal maps.The
choice of normal maps instead of bump or displacement is because they are finally supported in rendering in Max 7 , and for a
still image they`re a great chompromise between the quick low quality of a bump map and the performance expensive quality
of displacement.
In order to do this I had to carefully uv map all the mesh parts I wanted to details, export them one by one in obj, import t he
obj`s in zbrush, detail and generate some normal maps to be assigned in the bump channel of the max`s materials (the material
structure to obtain this is displayed in some pictures later – texturing and lighting section)
After modelling and uvmapping I had to put the character in pose, I choose for a quick solution of moving vertexes instead of
boning, just because my goal was just to produce a still image, it took some time , including remodelling a “flyng” version o f
the mantle , but I think that It saved me time in the end .

The gotham city in the background was instead generated more or less procedurally through the Greeble plugin, later I added
some custon tall buildings to break the monotony of the skyline and add some visua l interest.
Check out the excellent greeble city tutorial by Jhoannes Schloerb at http://www.schloerb.com/

Texturing ,rendering and Lighting :

Texturing and material setting has been a time consuming step, because of the nature of the all hand painted (in Photoshop)
high resolution textures and because of material tweaking. I choosed to use Brazil as rendering engine and basically all the
clothings are modifications of the advanced Brazil Velvet shader, while the metallic stuff are a Brazil Chrome material.
See settings below which also explain the use of the normal maps in the materials slots.
About the lighting , there`s a direct key light which lits the whole stuff and cast shadow maps, a reddish low intensity fill light
on the left and a blue one on the right…plus some very low intensity fill lights here and there to light the more dark areas.
I choosed to render a global illumination pass separately, and to overlay it later in comp ositing for a better control on
shadowing.
Here`s the lighting setup, it`s for the standard unposed model, but the one of the final scene does not differ in the paramet ers,
just slightly on some light`s positions.

Compositing and touches up :

After having rendered all the elements separately (main body, city, and bats) it was time to finally composite, and produce the
final scene…it was a Photoshop job , including hand painting the cloudy sky and adding those little touches to make the whole
thing less artificial, like dirt and subtle detail on the city buildings, some distance fog…a glow effect on the white sky in the
back and on the shiny metallic surfaces, overlay the global illumination pass rendered previously.
Touches also incluse localized changing (through masks) of hue/saturation , to make the background fit with the lighting of the
max rendered scene, sharpening the whole thing and adding some subtle noise in the end.

Something about me :

My name is Alessandro Baldasseroni , I am 31, born, raised and reside in Milan. I always enjoyed drawing as a child and my
first experiments in CG were with an Amiga 500, I then learned AutoCAD working as a CAD operator in a telecommunication
firm in 1996. In the meanwhile, I began to learn and practise with 3D Studio Max and enjoyed it so much I started thinking to
translate my passion for CG into a job in the field. Two years ago I submitted my portfolio to Milestone, a leading Italian
videogame firm and luckily they hired me where and still work as a digital artist.