Buy 3D Models with 10% discount. Sell 3D Models with 70% royalty rate on 3D Export. The idea for this work came from while watching a chapter of one of my favorite anime series, Ghost in the Shell.

Introduction: Before I start anything I would like to thank 3D.DTUTS for giving me the opportunity to put my techniques used in the work on this wonderful website.

The idea for this work came from while watching a chapter of one of my favorite anime series, Ghost in the Shell. Aramaki Daisuke is next to the lieutenant Kusanagi my favorite and I wanted to make a small tribute to this work. It happened to me that I could use enough programs to practice a little with all of them.

Concept: References – I consider this one of the most important since it is impossible without a satisfactory job. First I catch some of the chapters where I can see the character’s facial features and hair, the area of the mouth, nose and eyes. The most characteristic feature of the character is his mouth and hair, so I tried to take care of that aspect much.Because my idea was to make a version of the character in more detail, something in between the anime and reality, so I had to use references of older people. For this task it is best to search in google or on websites such as deviantart.com. These references are very important to see and help in determine how to make wrinkles, follow the direction, details of the skin, different types of pores, blemishes on the skin and others.

STEP 1: Modeling

Modeling – The modeling of the objects is done in XSI because according to me it is the best 3d package. In this section I did not want to complicate much, what I wanted most was the practice of sculpture, I tried to correct everything so they don’t have groups of 3 and 5 sides. The jacket divided into two parts, the flaps and part of the shoulders, lapels models starting with a grid and adding edges as needed to give it the right way, then I symmetrize. The part of the shoulder started with a bucket and did the same thing, as your tie. With the shirt the process was similar to the one of the jacket with taken care of which geometry was not only overlapped and modeling the visible parts, unnecesarily not to waste the geometry within the jacket because it was notgoing to be seen. To model the eyes, look in google a good outline of the human eye and created the model.

The hair and the knob are simple cubes, the topology does not worried me because I would render the model with high resolution. Once this processis finalized, I export the geometry in. Obj format, to take them in other sculpture programs.

STEP 2: Sculpture

Throughout this process I used two programs, Mudbox 2009 and ZBrush 3.1, first to make the sculpture with the greatest wrinkles and the second for the wrinkles and small details of the skin. The common error that occurs when you make your first digital sculpture is to begin to detail the models at the highest levels of subdivision, Believe me, it is NOT a good idea to do that unless you’re a true genius of sculpturing. For a sculpture works, always work on the low-res base mesh and devote most of the time in the lower levels of subdivision.

Like a house does not start with the roof and a design is not detailed from the beginning, with the sculpture happens the same. Having said that, as you can imagine most of the time spent in the lowest subdivision sculpture appeared Aramaki, for this I focused on the main features of his face: small nose, part of the nose to upper lip bigger than normal, very long hair, to see if it works. I advise you to always try to make a material constant, like this is just the silhouette of the character.

When we have a good base so we can make major wrinkles of the face. To make a good crease brush I usually prefer “sculpt”, “pinch” and “smooth.” The first thing is to mark both sides of the ridge with the brush “sculpt” and “falloff” 2, then with the same brush, the “falloff” 0 “steady stroke” on a smaller size but marks the crack of the wrinkle. Now reslataremos the crease with the brush “pinch”, that what does is to bring together the points of the grid and finally we use “smooth” on the edges of the crack if we see that it has become very strong. Following this technique check all the wrinkles of the face of the main character.

Once finished the sculpture in Mudbox 2009 I exported the highest level of subdivision in .obj to ZBrush 3.1 and use the wonderful feature recontruction subdivision “of this program that allowed me to get the lowest subdivision for later able to the pose of the character. At this point I started to use the brush “inflat” with a low intensity and alphas of human skin for getting the details of the smaller pores and wrinkles. This part is very satisfactory, but it is very important to look good on different types of pores of the skin to obtain the good results.

STEP 3: Texturing

Polypainting used for the texturing in ZBrush. It should be borne in mind that for best results with this technique you need to know how it works: what it does, paint on the polygons are not using UV’s to paint, so if you need a texture of 2048×2048 (which is I used) then you have to paint polygons 2048×2048 is 4,194,304. I wanted to test the technique of painting the skin of Aramaki with Airbrush. This consists of painting the area warm, temperate and cold regions of the face and then add a layer of soft color on them. With a custom brush I painted the warm areas first, then cold and finally hardened. Thentherearesomepatternspaintewhile you can do by hand or using the alpha 22.

In order to finalize the texture I superficially painted with a brush “standard”, a very soft and close to a color of human skin. The rest of the objects I painted with a base color and tonal range just try to put them in and playing a bit with the color palette. The next step was to open the UV’s, Modo 302 having a powerful tools for this. From ZBrush export each tool on its lowest level of subdivision to import in modo 302. Once you open the UV’s, which took me about 10 minutes (now I understand that I said “powerful tools for this, no?), I went back to the matter. Obj in ZBrush to transfer UVS every tool at its lowest level of subdivision, and thus able to transfer textures polypainting created with the “texture> col> texr”.

STEP 4: Shading, Illumination and Render

This part is done entirely in XSI and I must say it is the most rewarding because it is where you begin to solidify and enhance the results of the work, which I enjoyed very much. For the skin shader I used the FastSkin after obtaining the textures in Photoshop. Layer “diffuse” is the texture as you havepainted, “epidermal” gives texture Desaturation and “subdermal” saturating it. “Back to scatter weight” is a black and texture which indicate where the color is more pronounced the translucent effect of subsurface scattering, in this case, ears and nose. All other materials are “phong with values adjusted to speculate.In the area of illumination light used for soft shadows. I wanted the left side had a bluish hue and in right a yellow hue, as they are complementary colors and composition tend to give very nice results. Configured to render an image at a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, and the lowest possible aliasing.

Post – Production – The last step was to finalize the details in photoshop, so I took a texture of the wall to adjust the levels and put a gradient from to yellow (left to right) over and playing with blending modes and opacity according to my liking. Then I added a bit of noise and placed as a background image. To make the picture more interesting, I added a little blur in the silhouette of Aramaki and trim the image to a square format to play around with the image composition. Don’t hesitate in sending your comments.

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