A Small Digression

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The cover illustration is made in 3ds max. We asked Dmitry Morozov, the author of the picture and the chief artist of Moscow studio Ariorh, to tell us about its creation.

"This work was done quite long ago, in late 2000. The scene was prepared for a demo reel of the studio. We used 3D Studio MAX 3, the plug-ins Character Studio 2, Digimation Shag:Hair, SimCloth, mental ray, and, of course, Adobe Photoshop for drawing the textures.

"The sketches were made by Timur Mustaev.

"The model of the character - hunter - is made using a combined technology. The rough model was based on the splines, with further 'upholstering' using the Surface modifier, and then finished up on the editable mesh level (Edit Mesh).

"All textures were made manually, merged on four channels: Diffuse, Specular Level, Glossiness, and Bump, and a separate set of textures was prepared for each channel.

"Hair is created using the Shag:Hair plug-in, clothes - SimCloth.

"For the posture and animation of the character, the Character Studio plug-in was used - at that time the only possible solution." (In version 3 there was an option for using "bones" and "skin," but these tools left much to be desired, especially the inverse kinematics system. - Boris Kulagin)

"The mechanical 'war-elephant' was initially created using NURBS, for their mapping was simpler, then finished up on the polygon level. All textures are drawn.

"The landscape was made using the standard Displacement based on the vertices' map.

"Rendering was made using mental ray.

"The whole work from the modeling stage to final rendering took 12 days."

Other works of the studio can be found on its website at http://www.ariorhstudio.com.

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