At the start of this project I wasn’t sure if I wanted to render it in Lightwave or Zbrush. I probably could have created a slightly better rendering with Lightwave since it would have more accurate shadows. But during some early Zbrush test renderings of the scene I felt I was getting great results from the Zbrush rendering engine. I decided the possibility of a slightly better render didn’t outweigh the time involved in creating the displacement maps and color maps, among other things, and setting it all up in another app, especially with the submission deadline just around the corner.

At the start of this project I wasn’t sure if I wanted to render it in Lightwave or Zbrush. I probably could have created a slightly better rendering with Lightwave since it would have more accurate shadows. But during some early Zbrush test renderings of the scene I felt I was getting great results from the Zbrush rendering engine. I decided the possibility of a slightly better render didn’t outweigh the time involved in creating the displacement maps and color maps, among other things, and setting it all up in another app, especially with the submission deadline just around the corner.

For the pose I just wanted something simple, something to suggest he’s welcoming you to his home; the cornfields and pumpkin patch. It was one of the few times I was actually happy with the very first sketch of a design and I was able to move on to the color sketch right away. I used a real cornfield photo for the background, painted in some indications of mid-ground bushes and then blurred it quite a bit for a simple DOF effect. I ended up keeping that part of the sketch and imported it directly into the background of the final image since it worked so well for the color sketch.

Color texturing the scarecrow wasn’t too difficult using Zbrush’s poly painting features. I filled each subtool with a solid base color then used the cavity mask feature in the brush palate, which enabled me to make the fabric pattern more noticeable and also helped to paint dirt into the cavity areas. I used a scatter brush to help keep the placement grime more random looking.