I wanted to push myself on how far I could go, so I decided to build a piece capable to make an art statement; I didn’t want to feel that it was just another 3D model.

Being an automobile nut, I, like some of you, have had the idea of building a car from the first to the last bolt. I find out that for this task a good set of blueprints is never enough. I spent around a week collecting photographs before the beginning of the modeling process, and I was still collecting references at the end of the texturing and rendering steps.

My first advice to you will be, if you are trying to make a model above average, start with planes, boats or cars that had been restored. You will easily find part catalogues, illustrations, schemes and diagrams of objects with historic meaning. I made a quick selection of some of the GT-40 pictures I found during my research (Fig. 01).

I usually try as much as possible to start from spline cages. It comes very handy to have a tridimensional blueprint of your model; it will guide you making decisions about size, position, and where your components should be organized, even before you model the shell.

Later on, you can use the spline curves to loft panels that will be the base mesh of your car body.
Once I had my cage done, I started modeling the chassis using photo references (Fig. 02).

The next step was modeling all the components that have direct relationship with the chassis.

I always started creating primitives to establish rotation and proportions, and then I went in detail using pictures. Here once more I used techniques like nurbs revolves, lofts and extrusions than later on turned into polygons.

Finally, I used lattice and nonlinear deformers to achieve the desired shapes (Fig. 03, Fig. 04, Fig. 05).

WARNING! This Making of Contains Nudity.

Software Used :

ZBrush

The original idea for this image came out of the references I’d collected. Whenever I start a new artwork, I do a lot of research and then I start the modeling (Fig.01).

Fig.01

With these references, I blocked the model with a simple base and I did some primary tests with the composition of the model (Fig.02).

Fig.02

As the idea matured, I really needed some specific references for the towel on the head and how its drapery would work. So I took some pictures of a relative of mine doing the exact pose with a towel (Fig.03).

Fig.03

I used the same real-life reference for the towel in the model’s hand (Fig.04).

Fig.04

Qiane is a character from a story I am developing so I had a pretty strong idea of how I wanted her to be presented. The story is based in an alternate dimension, a world that shifts in and out of the universe as we know it. Qiane is the Goddess of Illusions, the queen of Eithanas (as the world is called) and the personification of the false realm itself. Shifting between the living world and the afterlife, those who get into Eithanas may not get out, unless the Goddess wills them so.

The daughter of Rakhn, she inherited his power of weaver-magic. But while Rakhn preferred to weave his way into the fates of the living, Qiane wove her magic into creating her own world though what her hands created, her sight destroyed. So she veiled her eyes, content to live in her own illusionary world and see through Valha and Mentit, her pet crows

I was highly in love with the Pre-Raphaelite Art and Orientalism and I wanted to bring in some of the same rich, lush feeling into my artwork. So I first started with a couple of color keys to set the mood. I knew I wanted some richly textured fabric in the painting to add to the grandeur and I finally settled on a warm red-orange scheme with some purple blue to balance it out a bit. While I tried out the colour keys I also tried a few combinations of poses for the composition and finally settled on a traditional iconic profile view.

This is the fun part! After I decide on my sketch, I usually go about collecting reference or shooting some myself. I already had some references for the style I wanted (paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Waterhouse, Bouguereau) and the next thing to do was to have a photo shoot with a model. It is very important to have references when you’re painting/drawing. I think using a reference doesn’t make you a lesser artist; it makes you a smarter artist as long as one does not turn a slave to the reference (which means copying your reference blindly without analysing it and/or making no changes whatsoever). You might like certain aspects of a particular reference – colours, form, mood etc at the same time you might feel it is lacking something, which you can add by yourself in the painting. It is important to keep an open mind.

Once I have my reference images ready, I slowly start to mould my sketch into place.

I usually start with a smaller resolution, about 500x700px@300dpi and gradually increase it as I start adding more detail. I start with blocking out the basic shapes with big brushes when I start out and as I move along the painting I fill in the details. The first thing to remember whole painting is to define your light source and position and start blocking in the shadows. This helps to get a three dimensional feel to the painting.

I usually start with the head because it’s the defining area for the character and I find it the most exciting to paint. For portraits/skin tones, I do follow a general pattern, but I improvise and adapt it to the image. I start by adding darker masses around the eye sockets, under the nose and below the lips, once the light source is defined. I generally divide the face into 3 colour areas- the forehead is yellowish, the cheeks/nose are redder and the chin is usually blue/green (well not so much for females, but it’s a just a guideline) Then depending on the look I add blues/purples around the eye, dark reds for the shadows in nostril area and such. The shadow areas of the face are usually the same as the background colour, maybe a little more saturated in the “penumbra region”(which is the lighter part of the shadow) where there is bounce from the environment. I think what really makes or breaks the feels of skin (as for everything else) are the highlights. If I go for a cyan light source, I add some yellow around it. Most of the subtle hues are added with a light hand in the soft light mode.

I continue refining areas of the face. One excellent habit to cultivate while painting is to regularly flip your canvas horizontally while you are painting. This helps your eye to spot the mistakes that you get immune to when you start at it for too long. Another trick to not over/underdetail parts is to open up another window of the same file (In Photoshop CS2, Window-.jpg>Arrange-.jpg>New Window), keep one zoomed out and one zoomed in while you are painting. This will help you to see the overall picture while working so you don’t get lost in insignificant details.

Save your file often! Once you’re happy with a certain level, save it and close the file. Then reopen and start working. This way, if you make a lot of changes while painting and suddenly decide to go back to how a certain part looked earlier, you can use your history brush there to restore that area.

Once the head is in a decent shape, I shift my attention to the folds of her dress. Painting is a bit like sculpting, dark areas recede and light areas project. Keeping this in mind I paint the folds while following the general form of her body at all times so that the cloth doesn’t look ‘pasted-into’. I also start paying more attention to the background at this stage. It’s important to keep analysing your reference as you paint. If you do not understand the material properties of the objects that you paint, you’ll never be able to paint them convincingly enough. Keep asking yourself, why is this so shiny? Where is that green coming in from? What’s making that skin look rich and healthy? The more you observe and analyse the more you train your eye. This is probably one of the hardest things to learn, so start practicing!

Here I shifted my focus to her dress and started refining the folds a bit more. It’s important to keep in mind that the flow of the fabric must correspond to the form of the figure underneath.

I continue refining her dress and also start painting in the bed that she’s lying on, deciding on the final colour for it that will be in harmony with the rest of the image. At this stage I also start trying to show the weight of her body against the bed and the folds that arise because of this.

I decided that this image needed a more surreal, delicate background to emphasise the goddess and illusionary aspect of her. I started adding soft cloud like forms in the background.

I started the cowgirl with a simple base mesh (provided by Marshu Mishu AKA FX81) did some minor mesh changes on it to reduce pinches is some areas.

When I was done with that I took the base mesh to zbrush and started sculpting the female body. Once I was done with a decent sculpt which I thought was ready to pose, using zbrush transpose tools I posed the body and gave some final touches to the sculpt acc. to the pose. I mainly focused on the curves of her body to make her look hot and sexy.
These are the shots of the workflow.

Before I started the sculpt on the head I split it into diff. subtool so as to make things easier and faster to sculpt on.
Once I was done with the head I took a cube and started to sculpt hairs on it as I wanted to try hair scultping in Zbrush.and using subtool master I mirrored and merged the hairs into a single subtool and tweaked it to fit them on her head. Here is the process.

After finishing the head and the body, I started to focus on the cloth and leathers she would be wearing. what I did was I took the mid res posed body into max, and made simple base meshes on the areas I need the cloth and leathers, then I imported all those meshes in zbrush and started sculpting them individually as it gave me more freedom to switch on higher sub-div levels.

when I was done with the clothing and leathers, I started doing the hard surface accessories and stuff like that in 3dsmax by importing the midres meshes from zbrush and simply making poly surface on the midres meshes
Using polyboost tools .After that it was time to make the guns… which I always hate the most: P. but I made them…
Here are some caps of that process.

Finally I merged everything together and it was great that zbrush was able to handle so many subtools with high subdiv levels.
For the final touch I used transpose masted to make some final tweaks
To the model to get everything fit nicely. Hence this was the final result.

Some time ago several friends of mine who are enthusiasts of CGI kept asking me why I didn’t try modelling a realistic cg human being. Although I really like stylised yet complex characters, such as characters from Final Fantasy games or Blizzard Entertainment and Blur Studios cinematic characters, which was the kind of style I’ve been aiming o achieve in the majority of my cgworks(with of course, a personal touch to them) realism isn’t quite something that hadn’t occurred to me as well. I’m really happy with the results I got, and very proud of the reception this image has been receiving, even to be included on Ballistic’s Publishing Exotique 4. It makes me want to produce more realistic characters.

Still, there’s a lot of more fantasy like images that I also need to create. But I’ll return to realism again eventually. Some people argue that realism is more difficult to achieve than a stylised look. In my opinion, be it either realistic or stylised or even anime or more towards the Pixar look, all these styles are difficult to achieve when you’re aiming to achieve them with a degree of high quality. It’s one of the good things about Cg I believe, there is quite a lot of different styles one might try, or even who knows, create a new one unseen. It’s very exciting from an artist viewpoint. .When this idea of a realistic character came up, I decided that I should include this realistic model in demoreel, thus it is why I’m spending more time on her than other artists would do if they were doing the model just for a still image. I need to make sure all edge loops are good, all mesh objects are made of quad polygons, and that they would deform well when rigged for animation. For the face, loops that would enable facial animation, and for the body, the joints. For the cloth, either modelled wrinkles or a mesh that is prepared for cloth simulation. Finally the hair, which has to be prepared for hair dynamics as well. In resume, it means this model, will not only look like this on the still image, but also in all kinds of situations(with a big hopefully in the middle lines ^_^), camera angles and lighting rigs. With all this in mind, I had to find a person to model after. Klara Medkova, the Czech supermodel came naturally as there were so many good pictures of her available. I bought the Dvd from Ballistic/3d.sk Ultimate Klara medkova dvd to get those good references, and I was ready to start.

Some of my medkova’s reference Note: keeping a Stash of high-res photos to use for reference or for texturing purposes is absolutely mandatory. And make sure you keep a backup of it! Reference plays a huge role in my work, specially if it is a photorealistic one. Anatomy books are great to learn from, but sometimes, reality kind of doesn’t match what it is in the books, so I try to always check both for reference. Better having more than few right? So I’ve began modeling her, starting with the head. The head is the most important part of the human model, so if it doesn’t look good, even if the rest is good, it will always make the rest look weird or inaccurate. Although the opposite is also true, a great looking head will not save a poorly built body. But the head is where you should spent most time on, because in the daily life, the head is the area of the human being with whom every person spends the most time with. It’s how you recognize persons from one another(unless they are twins). Also it is from the faces that you can tell if a person is sad or happy , unless they are faking emotions(not to mention body language, but that’s kinda off topic right now). Now which area of the head is the most important? Well, all parts are, but the eyes are particularly important. In Japan, anime characters are made of very simplified facial shapes, but the eyes have a lot more detail than the rest, since the eyes contain a lot of emotion. Like someone said, the eyes are the window of the soul. Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean is an awesome model, with all those ragged clothes, tentacle beard and the sss on his wet skin, but his eyes, they’re his soul. Every realistic character needs realistic expressive eyes, or, the model will be dead. Thence it’s only natural that one spends sometime on the eyes of his/her character. This is not only applicable to humans, but to monsters and robots likewise(for example, Michael Bay on Transformers wanted Optimus Prime to have eyes that could depict emotion).. However, the way I built my eyes isn’t complex at all. The process is quite simple actually. It’s not necessarily the best way to do things, but I find that it works pretty well for me. Here’s how I do it: A create a sphere, set the polygon count to a lower number(it’s going to have turbo smooth afterwards anyway). Name the sphere “Eye”. Now duplicate it on the same position and scale it up for about 5% Name this “Cornea”. Ok, so now we got two objects, a cornea mesh, and an eye mesh. Select the eye mesh, convert it to Editable poly, select soft selection with a bit of radius, and now pick the center vert of the eye, where the center of the pupil would be. Now push it back. It will create a concave area, the like a real eye has. Chamfer the center vert to make a more flat look on that area.

From Sphere to eye Now select the cornea mesh, and do the exact same thing, except than at the last stage , instead of pushing backward, pull forward. Now you have the eye completely modeled. Pretty simple heh? I find that some times, the simplest things are the ones who look better. In the past I’ve made eyes with several parts, but I found that I never got great results with it, not to mention that it was quite troublesome.

From sphere to Cornea. What you could do afterwards is attach the 2 meshes, and apply different material id’s to each other. That would help simplify the rigging process later on. You might be thinking that with only this shapes, you wont be able to make the pupil contraction or dilatation animation, but it isn’t quite so. If you want to keep pushing it further, you just need to make some morpher modifiers for that kind of shapes, or even use scale modifier on just that area, and write some scripts to get control of it, or even use reaction manager.”Making of Medkova” by Fábio M. Silva So now we have the eyes, but what about the head? For the time being, we’ll call it a day as far as the eyes go, we’ll save them for later. When we have our base structure of the head we will merge them in and position them into place. This way you can also use this eyes for later characters too. Now for the head, I usually load up my references into regular planes with 1×1 segments(why 1×1? Because I use F4 to display edges a lot, and this way the planes won’t show they’re edges which are distracting.) . Also make sure you set the planes to be 100% self illuminated on the material editor.

You will have a lot of stuff going on the scene, we don’t need any more edges to confuse us even more. With this in mind, create a small plane on anywhere on the model’s frontal part of the face and extrude your way out. Edit poly modeling is the way I prefer to do it. Don’t just model using one viewport, keep an eye on both at all times. If you like modelling on a single view like I do, you will find yourself switching from one view to another very regularly.

The way I do this, is to set the Orbit mode to Orbit SubObject. This way when I have the head mesh selected, I’ll rotate only around it.

This is the way I like it! Also to take note, I try to make the mesh be all quads, and keep those quads shape and size even. There are no big tricks on modeling the head. Just keep going, until you have the frontal part done.