Download this page in PDF format
I’m so used to rendering in “large” scale, the idea of coming up with an avatar for a friend that would fit in Yahoo Instant Messenger’s display image restrictions of 96×96 was certainly different.
Figuring out a pose that would work at such a small scale was tricky, but one of adamthwaites’ freebie PoseKit poses seemed to fit the purpose.
I put it over a curved backdrop to give it a studio feel, and used a three light set-up, one being a spot from below the camera position to bring the eyes out – test renders without it left the eyes as black spaces in the final render.
I used material ambient occlusion instead of light AO, it always seems to give me sharper AO shadowing.
The skin was tweaked using RealSkinShader to give it more texture.
I always render to a higher resolution than the final intended rez, so I set it at 384×384 for the avatar render (4 times larger than the target).
Rendering was done using Firefly, with the settings pretty much maxed out. Raytrace bounces was set to 6, to give the material AO the needed “kick” to show shading at such a small resolution.
The image size was simply reduced down to 96×96 for the final avatar version.
The final version came out really well, so well that I decided to render it again and tweak it with additional postwork as a standalone for my friend.
The setup was the same, except the render resolution was set to 768×768 – twice as large as the one reduced for the avatar. This allowed me to reduce the image back down to 384×384 for the final product.
Because the scale is larger, and the image was going to go for postwork, I did multipass rendering, giving me a “complete” image, an AO pass, a shadow pass, a depth mask pass, and an unshadowed pass.
I took the resulting images into Photoshop and composited them as layers, then stuck a layer on top and added a border. A few layer effects on the border layer, and voila!
I have to admit, I’m dead chuffed with this one – the avatar image came out looking really sharp and even at such a small resolution the impression of depth is evident.
(And yes, I know it seems to look like Paulie Perrette, that was a happy unintended coincidence resulting from the angle, pose, and lighting!)
Shortlink for this post: http://wp.me/p2cbiZ-5Z
very good, maybe one day, my sister will make an avatar for her…*smiles*
WOW!!!!!!!! Gee I want one!!!!!! Smiles wonders what I would look like
To be honest, hon … The obvious answer would be something NDN-themed, but the quality of commercial NDN-themed clothing for 3D work is kind of laughable.
Actually, if it wasn’t so sad, it’d be hilarious.
I’d be more than happy to try to come up with something for you, but I’d feel kind of weird offering you an avatar that was NDN-themed using what’s out there, because I know that *you* know I know better and that what’s available isn’t exactly what you’d call “accurate”.
Just giving you a heads-up so you don’t ram me at the GMU powwow