The latest DrawerGeeks assignment was to take a drawing done by a child, and then so an illustration based on that drawing. So I picked this drawing by my five year old daughter:
I decided I want to do the illustration so that it looked like painted clay, while following the spirit of her drawing as closely as possible. So here’s what it looks like:
click on the image for a nice zoom, and look below for some making of stuff.
After getting my daughter’s sketch, the first thing did was to do a very basic simple low polygon model of the alien’s head. I know, I know, it doesn’t look like too much right now, but just wait. It’ll get better. I hope.
Next I converted the polygon model into subdivs to smooth it out. Oooo, so subdivilicious.
Then I did some 3d sculpting, adding some wrinkles, some brows and the I popped in the eyes and the teeth. Paying special attention to getting the teeth the same as my daughter’s original drawing.
Now he’s starting to look not too shabby, it’s definitely time for some texturing. The first thing I had to tackle was the UV map for the model. I have to confess, I haaaaaaate texturing polygons and subdivision surfaces. I’ve always avoided it in the past. But when my buddy Keith Lango showed me the roadkill plugin for maya, it made me very happy. Here’s the original uvmap for this guy.
As you can see, not so easy to see what’s going on. But after using the roadkill plug, I got this:
Much better, much cleaner. I can now see where all the eyes are, the mouth is, etc. So then I took this into Painter and could paint the surface knowing exactly where all the strokes would go.
I used a brush with “impasto” in Painter. That means it includes some depth information for the brush strokes. I took that information and created a bump that I could bring into Maya.
Then I brought the painted texture and bump map into Maya and created a very simple material shader for the alien. As you can see, the painted texture is just going into the color for a blin shader, the bump map is going into the bump channel, and I have custom brownian 3d texture that I drove into the blinn’s eccentricity to scatter the highlight across the model more. To make it less plasticky. I like to talk like this at the checkout line too.
Next, I wanted to use some image based lighting for this illustration, so I picked a photo that my wife had taken of me and my daughter at the beach. It had the light blues and purples I was looking for to light my scene.
Then I set up just two extra lights, one key light to cast some shadows, and one rimmish light to cast a night green color from the side. I also turned on Final Gathering so it would calculate the image based lighting and color bleed as well.
And here’s the final render again and some zoomed in areas of the illustration. I hope you like it!
show hide 16 comments