Subtitles of the Movie

So as I discussed in the last video I created some renders, many renders as a matter of fact, from that ZBrush model that was composited with the SketchUp components that I made like the staff and the mask and I did it from many, many different camera angles with many, many different types of Perspective Distortion to see what would give me the maximum impact from my sculpt and to see if I couldn't find something that was better and more dynamic than my original pose that I had in my composition for my cover and I did. I found something that I felt was much better and much more interesting looking than my original pose and the downside of this particular one is that I dropped out Leon from this particular composition, which is not necessarily what I wanted to do, however, I think that this is a little bit more engaging and a little bit more eye-catching which is really the purpose of a cover. I mean a cover is the advertisement for the comic, so it really needs to catch your eye on the stands. It needs to stand out from everything that's around it and sometimes the simplest things are the best because as they used to say when they were accepting submissions over at Marvel what they're looking for is an iconic cover and you know, what I'm doing here is a fairly iconic shot of Scales. It's a first issue shot. You're introduced to the character. We don't have any idea what the story is but at least we're getting something. Now, this is what I would consider to be a breakdown, meaning that we're not yet going to our finished work, we're simply getting an idea now of working out the problems and seeing if we're actually going in a good direction. Is this going to work for us? Is this not going to work for this? Now you can see here I composited in a rough copy of our copy and I can just turn that off and then here's our render and what I did was I just extended our background color on the canvas so that it was matching our render so that we really had an idea of whether or not this was going to carry through because this'll just be more or less sort of representing the water that he's standing in and we'll see the ripples of water and we'll have gear like his gauntlets and his boots and the stripes on his costume and all of that kind of stuff will be in the final piece, however, like I say, this render gives me a very good reference for things that are going to be very difficult and complicated like, for instance, his scales. How they're going to be lit by the staff; how is that staff going to reflect on things like the metallic parts of his arms? How is the glow of his eyes going to play out in that dark? How is the overall lighting scenario going to play out in that dark? What would be the overall color scheme? Now, once I had a render I went ahead and I modified that in Photoshop using its Color Correction Tools because color correcting a render is an awful lot like color correcting a photograph and Photoshop is meant for doing exactly that - color correcting photographs. That's what Photoshop is best at doing and my advice to you is don't use Painter, which is a natural media emulator, for doing photographic work. I really don't think Painter is a particularly well-suited program for dealing with photographs. I think Photoshop is a much better fit for that. However, since my primary goal is to end up with a painted finished piece obviously that's the destination for this particular bit of reference and that's exactly what I would think of this as, as reference. This is, as far as I'm concerned, exactly what it is. Now, what I would say about rendering and I didn't show you my rendering software, is that rendering is a very, very complicated subject. It takes a lot of energy and there are pretty much whole subsets of 3D where people specialize in doing nothing but rendering with a particular Render Engine. Hopefully in the near future I'll be teaching a course on Maxwell Render, which is my rendering engine of choice. However, there are many, many render engines out there, most of which will work with SketchUp and many of which that will work with ZBrush. So don't feel as if you only have a limited amount of choices. There's a lot of choices out there. You don't have to use any particular render engine. Most of them will be able to handle most of the type of stuff that you're seeing in this particular shot here if you know your way around them and, like I say, keep your eye out for future lessons from me and hopefully I'll be able to show you how I achieved this type of look inside of a render engine.