Murder On The Dancefloor - Making of Whenever you work or create there are different types of problems with everything. For me they typically lay in some of these areas; Rendering; it takes too long, Modelling; i can't model what i want, it looks crap, Texturing; i can't texture as i wanted, sometimes Lightning; the scene does not seem to be able to be lit properly. So everytime one problem occurs you think "well, this is the worst that could have happen, right?". It is rare that several of these problems occur at once. But with this image, i had major play with all of the above except for rendering. And hey, what is greater than if nothing you touch works, everything seems to say "I don't like you, i will not do what you tell me to!" In most cases i just leave 'things' to battle their bad mods out with themselves. Same here. I left things for a long time. When i came back 'things' still were moody, but i brought some time and i brought the crowbar as well, You fucking 'things' are not gonna hinder me, if you don't make yourself fit - i will make you to this time. It was a hard battle, it was frustrating, but i didn't show it to 'things'. At the end, i think, i suceeded. The image is ready, nothing left to chance, every pixel looks as i want it. Infact i wrote this long before i finished the piece, when i was too frustrated to work on the image, so made myself feel better assuming i had finished it. lol, god i am mad. But the more i give you to read now the less you have to wait for the images to load :). Showing these images is like showing a nice car after a crash... From A to J illustrates the search for the perfect mesh of a cloth, i tried a few plugins as well, such as the free simCloth v.3 from Chaos Software. But in the end i used Stitch from digimation. What was most difficult was to get the cloth to let the foot stay out and still look natural. I tried wind, i tried seceretly cutting a piece out...that looked bad. Stitch does something called "Live dragging" or similar where you can soft-grab a vertex and drag it into a direction and the cloth will act as if pulled; pretty cool. So i used that. At this point i was still planning to include, next to the things that made it. PoliceChalkDrawing PolicePhotocamera Pistol on the Floor FootPrints leading away from scene of crime Angel (winged robot) Leaving Robot’s Body Shadows from people standing around??? But then by minimizing the scene it got a lot more "iconic character", and honestly i was to lazy to add all that. The blood coming out was easy to make, just a shape which was extruded. What was more difficult was deciding how smooth should the cloth be? What wrinklage looks realistic? I wanted the cloth to be a typical hanky, because i image the robot to be fairly small. Here are some drafts from 2002, yet without texture, i did not have my scanner available at that point: Then in 2003 I started looking for the cloth texture, i scanned a typical "Tempo" Hanky, i am not sure if other countries use the same kind of hanky of if you have the same decorative pattern, i could just use what was available where i live. Notice how i replace the Logo with my name :) The decorative pattern has been removed and added in photoshop again, BECAUSE i couldn't not get the scan without distortion, but i needed a clean edge for the texture. that would be the bump-map and here is the hanky blood soaked...but it did not look good on the image, the red red was biting itsself...so i went without blood on the hanky. In the final image there are only very slight blood grease traces on the hanky. here you can convince yourself, blood does not look too good: This one was made in 2003, but i was not happy with the wrinkles, too crisp, too hard. starting over i got this: I tweaked alot by hand, sinlge vertices were moved, very tedious. I also rearranged the toetag slightly since 2002, and gave it the kind of knot that would actually be used. You can't see it in your 1600res wallpaper thumbnails but i rendered this in 5000x4000px and here is a 80%/100% shot: isn't that knot spectacular? And now you also know what's written on the tag; "andidas.com, august 2003". You always wanted to know that, right? :) And for all the masochists amongst you i post the ps layer palette screenshot: please let me know if you have found any mistakes or anything, or even found this useful.