War Machine.
First of I'm going to explain how I modeled the suit. The suit was heavily influenced by Phil
Saunders and Adi Granov design. I really like the Iron Man suit in the first movie, it has some
sort of realism to it, and I always wanted to recreated Iron Man myself, so that start of as my
base motivation for the creation of this image.
I am using Autodesk Maya as my main tools, I modeled the suit with a real working suit in
mind, so everything was a high poly Hard Surface modeling without any normal map
generated from Zbrush or anything.
* Click on the image for the full resolution.
Here's the wire :
Next thing is the shaders, which is the hardest part in the creation of this image. It needs
that sort of metal and car paint mixed together. Not to mention the brushed feeling in the
metal itself. But after a few tweaking it's started to get there.
Then it comes to Photoshop. I painted the model in Photoshop to added some rusty-ness
feeling to it, so it doesn't look so squeaky clean, I also put some initial little details like
stark insignia in the weapon and few other things too.
Notice that I'm not creating any UV map or using any textures for this. It's because the
suit does not move in 3D space. So I just render a particular view that I wanted and paint
the rest in Photoshop. With this method, I don't have to spend to much time building the UV
and painting the textures for the model in 3D space.
I think this method is the best and fastest workflow for me to create a still shot, instead of
the other way around. Especially with this image.
This is the most fun part from the creation of this image. This is where everything starting
to get together and where you determine the final look for the shot.
VFX is always been my passion.. And my vision from the beginning is that I wanted to
create this image exactly looks like a snapshot from a movie.
Foundry Nuke is used for composite the image. It's a complete pipeline tool with great node
based compositing system and a precise color grading tools.
Here's the snapshot of the whole project:
The first thing to do is to composite all the character passes. The diffuse, specular, reflection,
and ambient occlusion. Set the value for them using the blending mode.
Next thing to do is to put all the elements needed for the shot. Put some special effects,
adjusting the level, color correction, etc. This helps to bring more excitement to the scene.
Make sure everything is match together as if all of them were actually there and shot at the
same time.
After all of the elements placed in the shot, now it's time to make some final color grading and
adjustments to make the image stand out more. With Nuke color grading tool, your image will
be processed in 32 bit floating points, so it's a very sensitive and very precise color correction
tool. But it does gives a fast feedback just like working on 8 bit image. For me, it's just hard
not to fall in love with the Nuke engine.
Well, that's all folks! I hope you enjoy the workflow, and thanks for watching. I'll see you again soon.
For Indonesian friends, you can check out the workflow I posted in local forum: War Machine at KutuCG
Cheers!