By_ Edu Martin

I have always been fascinated by those amazing Mexican fighters, so I decided to create a 3D caricature of one. The image represents a photographic session of one of the fighters, perhaps to pose for some pictures for a magazine interview.

I started with a quick and simple rough sketch. Unfortunately I’m not very skilled with the 2D stuff so I was deciding the look of the character as I was working on it in 3D.

I gathered some images from the Internet to get some ideas about the costumes of real fighters and I used that information to dress up the character.

I modeled and textured the character in the standard "Da Vinci" position. Working that way made it easier to do the modeling, mirroring of the geometry and the creation of the UV maps. Once finished, I did a quick rig that allowed me to put him in the current pose. I wasn’t extremely worried about a perfect skinning because I was going to fix the bad deformation issues by hand once he was in the pose.

I used mental ray fast subsurface materials for the skin and standard Maya shaders with specular maps for the costume.

The lighting setup was also quite simple. There was an area light as key light from the top with a very narrow cone, and with a linear decay to focus the center of interest on his face. I added a front fill light for the face with a small value and a back light to add a little rim to the left side of the body to separate the character from the dark background. I also created a plane with a white surface shader that will add some reflections and some diffuse lighting once I switched on the final gather.

Finally I modeled a simple background, representing the empty gym where the character would usually train. I added in Photoshop the frame representing a picture taken by a high format camera and tweaked a little with the image levels.

As you can see, you don’t need very fancy tools/rendering engines/super pro tricks for creating an appealing image, so I hope this small making-of will encourage other people to create nice renderings.

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