Superman

This was our last assignment on Drawergeeks.com. Here’s some of the steps I used to create this:

Starting with the sketch. I wanted him to have a nice strong jaw, and big swooping hair. I thought replicating the curly motif found in his hair, in his cape would give the image a sense of symmetry. Plus I just like swoopy hair and curly capes.

Next I modeled him in Maya. This is a side, orthographic view of his wireframe model.

And here’s a shaded view of the model with the clouds.

And here’s the final rendered illustration. I used image-based lighting for this, my first time trying that. That’s where you use a high dynamic range image to generate the lighting in your scene. There are no actual lights in this scene. Kinda nifty huh?