The Making Of The Second Ringclimber Illustration

The first image for Ringclimber was created on the Amiga personal computer, using newly commercialized 3D software and low polygon human figure models. Photographs and composites were used for the space scene - all this described in another workshop article.

What a difference almost ten years can make...

Here are the steps taken.

As with every computer art project, a large number of tools and components were used to create the final effect.

The beginning point was DAZ3D's Victoria 3 Poser figure, the Flip Do hair, and, of course, Poser. Here's Victoria in her basic state - the starting point.
Add and style the Flip Do hair, change the face parameters, add the DAZ Victoria Hi-Res skin map, the Blackhearted Black Eyes to replace the eye geometry, and we have a realistic character. This takes most of two days to get right.
Sharon, of course, isn't blonde (see Chapter 1), so the hair color has to change. More on the clothes later.
The right specularity in the face material makes the skin have a more live appearance, especially when combined with the bump map and reflection maps for the eyes (from the Live Eyes collection for Black Eyes).
Clothing was the next challenge. The first attempt was using "The Suit" and letting the color channel also drive a displacement map. This was OK from a distance, but didn't have the resolution or smoothness needed for the intended closeup.
Attempts to paint a higher resolution image on the Suit, using Bodypaint 3D from Maxon, were unsucessful, since the UV map for the suit had some anomalies, particularly when painting where the front and back joined. And the suit design, while a move in the right direction was not rich or interesting enough.
The Victoria 3 catsuit was more suitable for painting. I was experimenting with some of the Bodypaint fill tools when I hit on this asymmetrical design and followed it through to completetion. Because the primay image I was shooting for would be shoulders and up, I did not revisit the displacement mapping. However, a later image may need it for additional realism.
Carrara 3 provides an excellent Saturn model and can directly read Poser models and animations using the TransPoser plug in. However, the specularity of the face did not work well in the Carrara lighting. Rather than change it in Carrara, I rendered a Saturn backdrop and decided to try Poser again - at least, after constructing the helmet.....
The helmet and neck ring werea task. Splines were used for the helmet ring, because accomplishing the same end with a 3D boolean operation ran into the normal Carrara boolean defects of damaged and leftover polygons. However, the glass helmet required such a boolean to mate with the ring, and had to be hand repaired in the vertex editor. Next came the displays for the helmet glass. Unfortunately, it is very hard, if not impossible, to set up a realistic heads up display, such as that shown in this image, in Poser, because of its lack of decal mapping. Two days of experimentation in Bodypaint 3D left me convinced that it was going to be very hard to attain this effect using Wavefront OBJ files or 3DS files (or any other 3D file type that could be imported into Poser), while the Carrara material layers made the effect a matter of minutes. So back to Carrara, with manual changes to the imported face materials to get the specularity to an appropriate level. Some of the HUD elements were captured from Carrara dialog panels; the upper trajectory displays were hand painted in Corel Photo Paint 11. The result was placed in the Glow channel, with "White is Invisible" turned on to hide the opaque area between the display segments.