Ever go Number 3?

`delya drew THIS THING and immediately that feeling came over me. You know that feeling when your so inspired that you HAVE to make something, otherwise you'll start to smell of taquitos and look like the black guy from Mission to Mars and start having dreams where you turn into an angry robot version Gary Sinise and rampage Rubios? No?

I used to think that I would never be more proud of any render I've made than LOVE JUICE, but then I made NIMBUS. And then I was like, there's no way I'll make a render for a long time that I like more than that one. Then I made this render, and I crapped my pants. I consider it the spiritual successor to Love Juice, except it's coming out the other end!

Everything just seemed to fall right into place with this image, starting from the first test render all the way to the final eye-popping wallpaper. I never back tracked, so the image went together in an easy two days. Contrary to Nimbus, there was only one single color idea for this one. It basically from the get-go looked exactly like it does now. I placed a light and two reflection cards and wham I was done with lighting.


Credits go to `delya for helping me edit the final image and giving much needed advice on eyeballs.



Technical Details

Made in Maya 2009, rendered with mental ray. Created from start to finish in about 2 days solid work. Everything was created out-of-the-box, with no special tools. Lighting was done with one area light, and that's it! The ambience was accomplished with a pure white environment with a blue colored ground plane, which helped bounce the blue lgiht back onto teh character. 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 cloud was created with FluidFX in Maya. Render times were very good, and I was able to create several versions of the clouds, hearts etc before deciding on this one. 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 popping eye, the creases in the hands, the feet treads, the butt crack, and the areas surrounding the hearts that are on the ground. The AO was ussually 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 ground to shadow around teh hearts, but not around his feet.

The image had to be rendered in two main passes. One was without the glow, and one was with it. There was a few problems with the FluidFX cloud rendering with the glow incorrectly (the glow would shine through the cloud, no matter how dense they were), so I had to render both and combine them in Photoshop. `delya did the editing to combine them.


Picture Time

Here's a few shots from the viewport: EYE!, Anger, Lighting, Bad Angle

Here's a few low res model shots for you 3D guys out there: MY SPLEEEN, Circle of GUMS!, Footloose

Here is a couple under construction shots showing a few craptastic cloud renders: BUBBLES!, SPIDERS!, Early Test, Finger Fog


And for those of you who managed to make it all the way to the bottom, your reward is a PNG version: PING!