Making Of 'Beanpod Blooming'

Hello everyone, my name is Wang Xiaoyu, and I am a student in China. I am pleased to talk to you about my new work, 'Beenpod Blooming'.

Making the pose

In China, there's an ancient saying "a woman looks prettier when she looks back back over her shoulder with a smile. So, I chose this pose for this still.

I imaged that the girl was dancing when she looked back to the camera and smile. This is the pose that I imagined.

Modelling tips

There should be lots of detail in the eyelid and the eyelashes. Eastern girls always have soft eyelashes, especially the lower eyelashes. So, I chose transparency map for the eyelashes below, because transparency map 'faking fur' looks more soft. I chose the hairfx for the top eyelashes because the lashes should look harder.


You can see below, the upper eyelashes look harder, and the lower lashes look more soft, that's the distinguishing feature between transparency map and hairfx for eyelashes.

For the model of the eyeball I prefer the double-deck model. You can see the difference between double-deck model and only one model with textures for eyeballs.

Texturing tips

Then I started to add textures to the girl.


Textures are the most important factor to the final realistic girl. There are many high resolution human photos and textures on this website www.3d.sk - I selected a photo from here for my girl's skin.



These are the textures that I have composed in Photoshop from the photos.

Shading tips

I use 'mental ray fast skin sss' to shade the girl's skin. The shading network is shown below. I used almost the default setting of 'fast skin sss', but I still created some delicate effects with it, such as colourmap will turn to grey on the edge. Also, the bump value will turn to a high value on the part facing the strong light. Facing ratio can also create a fake 'fuzz' effect.

Hair Style

Hair is also important to a realistic character. I chose this hair style for the girl


To create this hair style you can read the following tutorial by Mike Fudge <<Maya Hair : hair with history>>. This is the hair style that I created in maya:

Lighting

Now, I'll show you the lighting used on this girl:

Rendering tips

Next, I'll render them all. I encountered a very difficult problem: 'out of memory' (because hair rendering for mental ray has a really tremendous workload!). My memory is 1G, which is too low to endure this. By all appearances I should divide them to passes.

To pick up the shadow of the hair without displaying the hair, here's a useful method; convert hairfx to a low poly, then assign a full transparent lambert to it and connect a mib_shadow_transparency mode to the mental ray shadow slot of Shading Engine.

Here we'll get only the image rendered, without the hair displayed.

Compositing

Now everything is prepared, let's compose the final image in Photoshop...

That's all! Unfortunately, I'm a little unhappy with the final image because my "bean" looks just a bit older than what I had originally imagined, but I hope that you still like her and my tutorial!
Thank you all here and thanks to the "www.3d.sk" for giving me such great girls' textures!

My Email & MSN: cigar_fish@hotmail.com - I will be glad to receive your mail!