Vishka Studio

As promised in the latest post of this series , here is the final model of our game character called Armin, a mythical [wiki]Persian[/wiki] warrior who clobbers his enemies with his two gigantic maces.

This character was modeled and shaded by Reza Ramezani using 3DMax 2009 and ZBrush 3.1based on concepts by Faraz Shanyar.

[caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”288” caption=”Armin warrior character concept”][/caption]

The model was textured in Photoshop and rendered using Vray and the whole process took approximately eight working days (we weren’t working on it full time). Most of the process was pretty straightforward except a few problems we had with Vray’s sub-surface scattering material. We were trying to obtain a rather realistic but at the same time stylized look for the skin of the character but we kept bumping into limitations on this shader.

[caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”288” caption=”Armin warrior ZBrush model”][/caption]

We had never done sub-surface shading in Vray before and we didn’t have any detailed documentation on the workings of the sss shader so we tried all the parameters and finally decided to use a blend material with the sss shader in one slot and a vray material with the paint map in the other. It worked pretty well and we reached 80% of the result we were trying to achieve and decided to add the rest in post. To do this we rendered another layer of skin using Mental Ray’s Fast Skin shader which gave a very good result and we added this to our character in our Fusion comp.

Here you can see some of the texture maps we used for this model:

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”384” caption=”Some of Armin’s textures”][/caption]

And the lighting of the scene which consisted of two spot lights, one acting as a key light and the other acting as a rim light. The rest was environment lighting and environment maps.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”376” caption=”Armin scene lighting setup”][/caption]

Here you have a screenshot of our render settings but we didn’t really fine-tune these since the render was pretty fast and we were getting a decent result:

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”438” caption=”Armin’s Vray render settings”][/caption]

These are some of the render passes we used to composite this image. We hope we’ll have the time to rig and animate this character pretty soon and we will give you an update on that as soon as it’s available.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”384” caption=”Armin render passes”][/caption]

Original Article