Headshot

Do you feel like I do?



`delya drew THIS THING and I had to render it. By popular and also unpopular demand.

The Zurds models are getting a lot better. This is easily the best face I've ever made for them. I also spent a lot more time on other details, like the gums, and the blood. I always knew when I made some of the other Zurds that I cut corners when modeling, for example the gums of NUMBER 3 were just too simple, and his butt didn't crease correctly. In this one I wanted the modeling to be perfect.

But the shading is what took the longest. I spent an extra amount of time on making sure the smoothness of the reflectivity and blur in their skin was perfect. It took a good 8 hours of tweaking just the reflectivity curve by itself, and another 10 hours or so for the other settings. The arrow feather things were done with maya fur. The image took a good 2 weeks of on-off work to complete. There was NO PHOTOSHOP USED, it came strait out of mental ray this way, from a maya file that was an easy 2.5 MB... unless you count converting it from exr to jpg. That's the interesting thing about this scene... since there's no post processing, you could essentially just open it and hit render and it's done. Don't even try asking for the file though, unless you have 20,000 dollars on the way to my house

One of the other main issues I had with this render was that the background was blue. Half of all Zurd renders have blue backgrounds. But I experimented with just about every possible color ranging from neon fucking krypton green to mayonnaise white... and blue was the only one I liked.





Technical Details</u>

Made in Maya 2010, rendered with mental ray. Created from start to finish in about 2 weeks. Everything was created out-of-the-box, with no special tools other than the 'p_raytype' shader. Lighting was done with one area light, and two colored reflection cards on either side (a green one on the left and an orange one on the right). The ambiance was accomplished with a pure white environment with a blue colored ground plane, which helped bounce the blue light back onto the character. It was essentially stolen from Number 3, don't fix what ain't broken right? The reflections were created with two bright round surfaces, and were set to ignore all final gathering. The edge reflections on the character were simply reflecting the white environment and helped define his shape. The blood was hand modeled and used the MIA material. Render times were very pretty good, except for when the tiles got to rendering the fur on the arrows, then they slowed the f down. The hearts were stolen directly from LOVE JUICE.

Much like my recent images, I have started using ambient occlusion (AO) a lot. In this image it was used to draw more shadow detail from his eyes, the creases in the hands, the feet treads, the butt crack, and the areas surrounding the hearts that are penetrating the zurd. The AO was usually colored in shades of blue, so that the shadows worked along with it. I once again had to use the special include/exclude options in mental rays AO so that I could tell which surfaces to be effected by it. For example, I wanted the shadow to effect his body, but not effect the blood.



For various viewport shots and other interesting under construction screen captures, please go to: THIS LINK RIGHT HERE


HAVE A GOOD DAY YOU