Pete Mc Nally's Blog

I did a piece this week for the Irish Sketch Society Comic week, I was messing about with some Batman and Joker bust sculpts, I decimated them, tesselated them, retopologised and resculpted them and then put them together in a 3dsmax file for posing. After rendering off a few passes and compositing them in Photoshop onto a Detective Comics image I found on the internet it looked like this:

Why decimate (reduce polys) and then tesselate (add polys) you might ask? I’ve found if you strip a sculpted model down to something very low poly, preserving only the most important details and then tesselate in Max you can get some very interesting shading results from the geometry, which can provide some nice results when rendering for a comic or cartoony style. The resulting geometry can be triangulated and messy, so I did retopologise it in ZBrush and sculpted over that a little. The first test looked like this and in some ways I prefer it to the finished piece:

Here is a breakdown of some of the passes used, fairly straightforward apart from the ink and contours pass, which I used to mask off the crosshatch effect:

Finally, here’s the wireframe:

~ by petemcnally on November 15, 2013.

Posted in Personal Work
Tags: 3dsmax, batman, cel, clown, colour, comic, comics, cover, crime, dark, decimation, detective, flat, ink, joker, knight, outline, passes, photo, photograph, photoshop, picture, polygon, portrait, prince, reduction, retopologise, selfie, shaded, style, tesselation, Zbrush