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    {digg}
    Introduction
    The subject of my work in “Myths and legends” Challenge which that took place on polish CG vortal – max3d.pl, was “Jimmie Hendrix – legend of guitar”. I needed something simple because my friend that was my partner in such challenges couldn’t anticipate due to the lack of free time. I didn’t want to work alone, I prefer working in team (+ I have more time for myself wink ). I started working on this piece rather late, I wanted to get it done on time so that was another reason why it’s so simple. My co-worker, Jarek, encouraged me to go alone, encouraged, encouraged and finally he convinced me. I just asked him to give me a subject. Day after my request Jarek gave me his idea of creating caricatural Jimmie Hendrix. I’ve fallen in love with this theme from the very beginning. So I began my work almost instantly from finding good references. (thx Jarek)

    References and concepts
    The first steps were set in google.com. I started looking for references/photos of Jimmie. When I had enough refs I began the modeling process. Photos had rather bad quality but I didn’t care about it much since I wanted to create a caricature with kind of disturbed shapes which will give certain mood to the whole piece.
    		 
     
     
     
    Modeling
    The main Jimmie model was done in Wings3D. I started from quick sketch of the head of the average human. Next, looking at the references, I wanted to make the sketch look like Hendrix by adding some characteristic face traits. The main goal was to expose some big lips, accentuate the nose and cheek bones. The Guitar was done in very similar way, I’ve found good reference photos and used them to create the model that corresponded with the original.

    Modeling of a character
       
      
    Guitar
     
    Textures
    Texture is one of the things that I hate doing. I wanted to achieve good effect using the simplest methods available. First I searched for nice photos in the biggest resolution possible.
    Next I’ve mapped Jimmie after posing him properly and rigging the fingers. To map the models I also used Wings3D`s unfold option. The corrections were made in 3ds Max in places where the texture had a tendency to stretch. I knew that the only spots which will be visible in the final image will be hands and head. So I scaled up the rest of body on the texture just to gain more space for the visible models. After that I baked the UVmap using Unwrap and opened it in Photoshop.

    At the beginning of texturing I established the skin tone.  Next I copied the detail from photos and added some extra detail by myself
      
      
     
    Materials
    When I started my work, I didn’t have exact plan how to render whole image, that’s why I decided to compose render elements in Photoshop. First I made few skin shaders tests in different rendering engines including Mental Ray, Brazil, finalRender and Vray. Renders that I liked the most were done in Mental Ray and Vray and so I decided to render final piece in those two renderers. Mental Ray was used to render skin and ambient occlusion pass, Vray helped me in rendering rest of the image. As I mentioned before, compositing process was done in Photoshop but about that in a moment.

    The best way to fast achieve interesting skin shader was to use Mental Ray’s fast skin shader. I’ve made few options adjustments, mainly for the lightning purposes. Final image was a combination of Mental Ray’s render and skin rendered in Vray.
    Lights
     
      
      
    Screen tests
    Rendering the hair
    I knew it from the beginning that I’m going to use shade hair for the hair rendering as I’m familiar with this plug-in for few years now. Just as I mentioned before, I knew that I'll mix it all together in Photoshop not to hurt my computer so much and not to prolong the render time. I did the same thing with the hair and at the same time I switched the model from the earlier phase of production, so that I had a head which looked similar to the final one but with lower polycount. I rendered it all with alpha channel with parameters as shown below:
      

      
     
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    Hair render on the sleeves
    As for hair on sleeves, I used hair/FX because I’ve done similar thing before and it was the easiest way for me to do it here to.
    Background
    As I mentioned before, I was very short on time, I had to do something simple but at the same time something cool not to ruin the whole scene. Jarek gave me an advice to do just the fog and volumetric effects. I tried it out and it turned out to be a jackpot. I used three colors that I’ve mixed together. To make this fog look more convincing I used AfterBurn since the basic fog available in max wasn’t good enough.  Thanks to the AB plug-in I could add additional mists and some sparks.
      
      
      
    The Rendering
    Process of rendering was quite easy. Below you can see a screenshot of rendering settings that were used to render almost the whole scene. Actually I can’t write anything more because in the rendering process you also take bits of pieces from the previous phases (such as lightning and materials) which of I wrote before. So the only thing I can add here is that after setting the right values I hit F9 and went for a good night sleep.
    Mentalray ambient occlusion settings
    Second phase of rendering was to set the scene to render Ambient Occlusion pass. I removed all the lights, HDRI map and turned on the Mental Ray renderer. This map showed of some blackened spots which I could use to add more sense of realism to the scene.
    Settings
    The lightning
    Global Illumination itself wasn’t good enough so I added one backlight to give a bit more of depth to the scene. Besides that I also added few smaller lights with multiplier settings about 0,2 which illuminated particular fragments of model. For an
     
      
     
    Compositing
    I added more contrast to the renders so that colors went a bit more convincing and made a copy of that layer – I always do it to have the main picture at the bottom. All operations I do on copies. Next I added rest of the layers that were ambient occlusion, hair and fog from the AfterBurn.

    Layers were overlaid in different modes, mainly overlay and soft light with different level of saturation. I cannot give you specific prescription how to do it because it all depends on what kind of effect you’d like to achieve – you have to just try out few settings to get the one that you like the most. It’s also good to have someone to look at the work that you’re doing. To tell if it’s better or not. There is nothing more helpful in this case as a fresh eye of someone not related to your work.
    {digg}
    About the Artist
    My name’s Marcin Klicki. I was born in 1985, I live and study in Poland, in a charming city called Gorzów Wlkp. I work with Jarosław Handrysik in Digital Aktimel Group. As for now we work only through the Internet, doing stills and various things that we’re able to get our hands on. We’re hoping to found a good production studio in the future.

    Related links:
    Digital Aktimel Group
    Marcin Klicki's CGPortfolio
    Discuss this article

    		 

    Mixing the colors
    Colors were very important to give more of a mood to the piece. That’s why I made few dozens of tests and max3d.pl forums users helped me to choose the best of them. Than, along with Jarek, we choose one.

    Of course I changed every of tests using the starting point settings using color balance in Photoshop.

     
      

      
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