Cover Story Full text from 3D Artist issue #39, page 6 article, "Cover Story" By Gary Dohanish, Ion Learaid __

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This cover comes from the idea that aliens have been among us for a long time in the form of legendary pixies, elves, and such. The characters are depicted here as both pixie-like and alien, shown on an alien world with multiple moons.
___ The cover model was created mostly in 3DS Max r2.5. The editable mesh that is beneath two to three iterations of MeshSmooth was designed to be as simplistic and minimal as possible, without sacrificing the detail I wanted. The question is, where do you draw the line? Except for this model's outfit and cat-like eyes, there are no texture maps here. I chose to use just colors and the new Oren-Nayar-Blinn shader in Max r3. This shader gives a porous, nonplastic appearance, which is what you would usually want for skin.
___ Using the Surface Tools plug-ins now part of Max with r3, I remodeled the eyes and mouth to make them less complex than the original. I merely traced the outline of the original poly eye and, through a series of copies and scaling, created the cross sections I needed to surface. The original mouth didn't have a cavity, and I was able to add this and a tongue using Surface Tools in the same manner.
___ The new editing enhancements in r3 would have made my original work a lot easier and more elegant. Soft selection, for instance, would have allowed me to mold the model, and MeshSmooth now allows you to look at its result while still down the stack in the editable mesh.
___ This model was not designed for the close scrutiny that a cover image gets. It was meant for character animation at video resolution. The animated wireframes you see behind the dancer show the base editable mesh of approximately 2,800 vertices.
___ The model has a Character Studio Biped applied using Physique. By adjusting Physique links, I was able to tweak the joints (lowering the tension and the bias) so that they had more angular bends.
___ The background was created in true world coordinates. The mountains are about ten miles away and two miles high. They were created by applying noise to a surface, and then vertices were pulled using soft selections. The lake is merely a blue box intersecting the landscape. The few plants are Archsoft tropicals, which work great in video-res animations but don't hold up as well in such a high-res still.

Gary Dohanish is familiar to longtime 3D Artist readers for his many articles about forensic and architectural topics. He recently got into character design using a box modeling technique he described in 3DA#37.

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Revised: 18 Jan 00
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