The Making of Lulu

By 3DM3

Like a good number of rpg players, I’m an addict of Final Fantasy series.So I decided to make my own fanart of an in game playable character. I chosen Lulu from FFX because she’s very adult ,serious and has a cold glance.

About me

Hi, my name’s TAURU Jimmy, I’m a 23 years old french 3D infographist. I made this work during 3 weeks in october 2006 trying to do my best,pushing my limits and knowledge in computer graphism.So I’m proud to show you my " making of Lulu"

Inspirations

Modelisation

I worked on 3dsmax to create the mesh and zbrush helped me to have good shapes and for texturing. I began making the head mesh, just doing the minimum required, i dont’t build the parts which’ll be hiden in the future. Then I build the hairs in polygons , it takes a long time to have this result, that was a hard test for my nerves but i didn’t give up. The clothes and props were quite simple to make, except the belts, placing them together trying not to interpenetrate eachover, patience required too.


	Textures First step, making the texture coordinates. I used the usefull " pelt mapping " in 3dsmax. I love this tool, it’s so easy to create the seams you need and the automatic UV stretshing is always fun to see. I used photoreferences for the hairs, the skin, and the clothes. Zbrush helped me to place them correctly and quickly. Then a lot of modifications were brought to those maps retouching colors, contrast stuff like this in order to step away from reality and get a stylised illustration.		UV head map head map eye map eyelashes mask clothes leather hairs map Some maps:



	Render settings Now we have the diffuse maps , but before making the materials i must set the render parameters. I do it before because light is the most important part of the picture conception and materials will depend of those settings. I made an interior scene with 2 lights one for the global illumination, the other to simulate sun rays. Render tests:


	Materials: The light is good, now we can seek good materials, this is about testing and adjusting until you have what you want. There is my own materials evolution:

	Skin shader: The diffuse map gives the colors, the reflexion map gives the speculars, the glossiness and the bump are for the lips. I made a sub surphace scattering effect with translucency.