Making of Wrestiling Fighter

I have always been fascinated by those amazing mexican figthers so I decided to create a 3D charicature of one of them. The image represents a photographic sesion of one of the fighters, may be to get some pictures for a magazine interview.

I started with a quick and simple rough sketch). Unfortunatelly Iґm not very skilled with the 2D stuff so I was deciding the look of the character as I was working on it in 3D.

I gathered some images from internet to get some ideas about the costumes of the real fighters and I used that information to dress up the character.

I modeled and textured the character in the standard "Da Vinci" position. Working that way it was easier the modeling, mirroring of the geometry and the creation of the UV maps. Once finished I did a quick rigg that allowed me to put him in the current pose. I wasnґt extremely worried about a perfect skinning because I was going to fix the bad deformation issues by hand once in the pose.

I used mental ray fast subsurface materials for the skin and standard maya shaders with specular maps for the costume.

The lighting setup was also quite simple. There was an area light as key light from the top with a very narrow cone and with a linear decay to focus the center of interest on his face.

I added a front fill light for the face with a small value and a back light to add a little rim to the left side of the body to separate the character from the dark background. I also created a plane with a white surface shader that will add some reflexions and some diffuse lighting once I switched on the final gather.

Fianlly I modeled a simple background, representing the empty gym where the character usually trains.

I added in photoshop the frame representing a picture taken by a high format camera and tweaked a little the image levels. As you can see you donґt need very fancy tools/rendering engines/super pro tricks for creating an appealing image so I hope this small making of will encourage other people to create nice renderings ;)

Thank you very much for reading
Edu Martнn

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Web site: http://www.theposmaker.com/
Contacts: edu at theposmaker dot com

Info: Eduardo Martin has been working in the Cg industry for more than 10 years. During this time he has been involved in all kind of CG projects, from tv animated series or videogames to VFX for tv commercials.

In 2000 he co-founded the animation studio Pixel in motion which he leaded for almost 5 years. He currently works as freelance 3D artist for tv commercials.