Here is the Aquila symbol of Captain Lysander showing the same technique as described above, from a boring base mesh with bad UVs to a cool looking object in a short amount of time.

Please note, that even if this method deletes tons of polys, there are still many to handle if you do this often enough. Captain Lysander has something like 6 million polys, but because my machine has 12GB of RAM this is totally ok. If you have less RAM, I would recommend using normal maps, which saves time during render and it’s easy for viewport performance, but delivery is not as accurate as a displacement map or geometry.

Conclusion

With this workflow, I created the complete model in two weeks. I kept the workflow really strict and every day I added some cool new parts and was happy to see Lysander grow quickly. As I said, the UVs are bad as hell, but they work to 95% perfection, even on close ups and are so easy and fast to create. The workflow is very useful for those dirty mechanical parts, but I would not recommend these techniques for female pinup models or whenever you need perfect UVs. As I wrote above, I also did not use this method for the head.

Final Image

As soon as all the parts of Lysander were finished, I built a small rig for him to set up the pose I wanted without moving all objects separately. I made a quick model of Lysander again in a very low poly way only using primitives. Afterwards, I created a skeleton bone structure and attached the low poly mesh to the bones and the high poly mesh to the low poly geometry. The bones have some IKs to it, which I can control over different shapes using a simple parent/child binding.

Now we can simply create all sorts of poses in very good viewport performance, and the hidden high poly mesh will move with the low poly one in the background. When you are finished with a pose, simply hide the low poly layer and unhide the high poly one.

All that’s left to do was to model the environment. I wanted a kind of cold looking throne room where Lysander is sitting and proudly looks at his battle trophy. That was no big deal after all; I modelled the throne, the flag and the other stuff in two evenings. The lighting was also somewhat clear to me, so I placed a few photometric lights to create a certain ambience in the image.

The main light comes from the MR spotlight and the light in front of the throne adds some atmosphere in the dark areas. Also, I used two rim lights to pronounce certain areas of the whole geometry.
The floor is completely tiled as you can see, but because we can only see such a small part in the image, no one would notice that. To give the floor a structure and depth I created a displacement map to protrude the broken tiles directly out from the floor.

For the render settings, I did not use final gather or global illumination, but Irradiance particles with importons. Basically, in MAX 2009, they are not available, only in XSI and Maya, but you can get access to it using a script. Simply search for Max Irradiance particles and you get some good explanation of how to use it in Max. Using these techniques, the image processing will take a little longer, but the results are really great and accurate. With that done, all that’s left to do was to hit render. And this is how it came out of Max.

I then rendered out an ambient occlusion pass and made some post processing, such as colour correction, adding fog/dust and tweaked some bright and dark spots. And after many hours, it was finally finished.I like both versions, but in the end, I decided on the darker variation, because I think it suits the image better and gives it that certain atmosphere.

I hope you could understand the pros and cons of my workflow. The best way to find out what you learned is to go try it for yourself. If you have any questions, you can contact me at www.destrega.de or destrega(-at-)gmx.net.

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