Texturing - Part 2 - Click to enlarge texturing steps

The texture of the engine is mainly a very shiny material with different valves of colored ambient occlusion applied in almost all of the channels, bumps, colors, reflections, speculars, etc. I then mixed it with other black textures in a Channel Alpha, to which I added noise and a lot of specular to get a greasy rusty and muddy effect for the lower part of the engine.

The eyes are a circular color gradient with a high specular and reflection.

For the helmet I used a paper film that I tore, scratched, stomped on, wrinkled, dirtied and then scanned and made it black and white with high contrast. I inverted it and applied it to a red texture in the Channel Alfa and I added a little noise and a high valve of ambient occlusion. The numbering and the lighting were other overlapped textures.

Lighting - Click to enlarge lightng step

I normally use many light sources and I place them so I can highlight the details of a scene. In this image I used 13 lights: 4 Omni lights as ambient lighting, 2 to highlight the form of the engine, 3 spotlights to highlight the back of the engine, 3 to stress the specular and the greasy effect on the shell and a spotlight behind the snail neck for the sub surface scattering. In addition to the sun, with the area shade and the sky with a HDRI with an atmosphere similar to the photograph of the road for the global lighting, I have used a surface with an asphalt texture for the floor and the yellow lines that are reflected on the engine. I also wanted it to add glow to the snail body.

Postproduction - Click to enlarge the postproduction details

A very important part of this piece was the postproduction, which I carried out in Photoshop. For the background of the image, the perspective and lighting, I made the final render activating the render multipass in a lot of channels so to have them separately in layers afterwards. This is useful to be able to work on each channel independently in Photoshop so that I have more control for the integration of the render on the photograph. So I had the specular, the layer for each light and another layer for the ambient occlusion. This way you get a very wide control on each channel and you are able to adjust the image as precisely as possible.

Links

Final Illustration :
cggallery.itsartmag.com/story.php?title=Super-Snail

Andres Hurtado's CG Gallery Portfolio : cggallery.itsartmag.com/gallery/andriu/

Andres's Hurtado's Website : homepage.mac.com/andreshurtado/Menu8.html

See Also : CG Gallery Making Of section : cggallery.itsartmag.com/makingof.php