The Making of 'Octopus'

Design Brief

Platinum is a graphics studio located in Rio de Janeiro. Working for the advertising market worldwide, Platinum produces images using photography, post production (in Photoshop) and 3D techniques. We received the ‘Octopus' job from an advertising agency and the challenge was to produce an image where a giant octopus was escaping from a kitchen.

Modeling

The first step was to divide the work between the photography and CG staff. As soon as the location photographs were taken, we went to research references for the octopus project. Since the species of octopus was chosen, we began to model from photographic references. As we progressed, we started designing the composition for the octopus in the scene. We created an octopus mock-up and, based on this, we created several sketches to define the octopus' final position.

The work was divided into three parts: head, tentacles and suction cups. In this way, the job became faster. The arms were done poly by poly. The head was done with box-modeling and subdivision surface editing.

Early sketch for 'Octopus', Bernardo Barbi

Composition/Pose

Based on drawings, we went to some effort to position the octopus in the scene. The kitchen's geometry was a recreation, based upon the typical size of a kitchen. For the tentacles we created a bone system for each one and positioned this manually. For the suction cups we made several models and deformed each one separately so we could get more details and speed up the process.

Texturing and Lighting

All of the textures were based upon photos that we took of a real octopus. We photographed it in several pieces, following the UV map as reference. At this time, we defined the scene's most important areas as the head, part of the eyes, tentacles and the bigger suction cups. For the shading, we used procedural bump maps, specular maps and reflection maps.

The most important tool for the realistic effect was the subsurface scattering, especially for the light and thin surfaces areas such as those on the suction cups. We utilized a HDRI map to simulate the kitchen's lightning and set up some omni lights to create bright areas in strategic parts of the model.

Wireframe 'Octopus', Bernardo Barbi

Skeleton for 'Octopus', Bernardo Barbi