Your act, Mike...

A piece I did for ​Daniel Gonzales' "The Art of Visual Storytelling" online class

UPDATE: after feedback, I went back in and pushed Mike's pose and expression, I dig it much more after the changes

Unlucky

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! 

Here's a piece I did for the Laika monthly creative challenge contest. The theme was to create a piece about an unlucky leprechaun. The time limit was 2 weeks, but I started a bit late, so I completed the image in 9 days. It was create with Zbrush, Maya, Nuke, and photoshop for final touches.

At first, I wasn't sure what to create for the contest, but I know I wanted to enter because it was a pretty good opportunity to practice my zbrush modeling. When I think about St. Patrick, I think of the saying about how he drove all the snakes out of Ireland. Of course he didn't actually drive snakes out, it was just a way of saying about how he brought Christianity to Ireland.

So from that saying, I began to think, "what if he missed one?" and, "it would be incredibly unlucky if someone was to run it him", and from that I had my idea. So I sketch the little guy out and began modeling him with zSpheres in Zbrush. 

I found it easier and quicker for me to model the hat, pipe, and coins in Maya, then export then into Zbrush, because they are much smoother and nonorganic. I then played with the hues and colors until I was happy. I was thinking at first to make the snake green but I was afraid if I put him on a grassy hill he would just blend in and vanish, plus I didn't want him to clash with the green hat.

The objects were then UVed so they could be polypainted and/or textures applied. I used ZAppLink to texture the pipe and eyes with photo images, and the snake and hat was texture with polypainting. I screen cap the progress, brought it into photoshop and roughed out what I wanted the background to look like. I thought a warm background would be a nice balance to the snake's cold blue color. Oh and I flipped the hat because I thought it looked to neatly placed on the ground before.

Next, the ground and foreground plants were modeled, and everything was sent to Maya for materials and lighting.  

 

Subsurface shaders were applied to the snake's body, tongue, eyes, and to the blades of grass. When you get up close to grass, it can be notice how the light penetrates it and it illuminates from it, so I wanted to try and recreate that look. I also experimented for the first time with Maya fur to create the far grass and the fuzzy texture of the felt hat. 

Since I needed to work fast and this is only a still image, I rendered out only the master beauty, an ambient occlusion, masking parts using blackhole shaders and white surface shaders (in post I used this as masks in nuke for color correction of individuals parts, normaly I would render out each individual part and comp them together but this saved me time instead of having to do multiple renders), and a Zdepth map. I then Composited in Nuke, added lens blur, played with levels and colors. Lasted, I painted little things in Photoshop like the shine of the coins and the browning of grass and then it was complete.

I hope you enjoyed, it has been the quickest I've ever crank out an image from concept to completion. Tough, but good experience.