Siamese Robots - Making of
So here it is, long awaited, a making of siamese robots. This is an inspiration and not a guide to create a 1:1 copy of my work.
Personally what i like best about this image is the idea, i haven't seen "siamese robots" anywhere yet, and i was proud on my idea.
once that idea came to my mind i made a quick sketch of it, in oder not to forget it :) - a typical sympthon.
A few weeks later i got down to realise my idea, i use r3 without any plugins or third party renderer.
So here are a two screenshots of how i setup my scene:
perspective
...as you can see; most simple, two lights, a camera, and a backdrop matte; a bent plane.
camera view:
as the camera sees it, the geometry creation was simply, chamfer boxes and a modified one for the main body. Meshsmooth options are set higher for rendering.
Then i started with the first test renderings, i wanted them to look glassy/ metalic.
yes it looks very ugly, creating the perfect Glass with your material editor, is a bit... impossible. I used my standard ray traced glass, and a reflective floor.
I make several renders, with different material set ups and options. Renders with materials that have the desired properties in speculars, reflections (i add some objects to be reflected then), renders with a diffrent light-setup or shadow casting.
another ugly render with crome-reflective properties.
Make sure your renderings are properly anitaliased (in Material Editor -> Supersampling (Hammerslay is my fav) and in the renderdialog -> checked (Catmull is my fav here))
AND very important: ALPHA channels, i do make alpha channel for every body part. And i render (try to) always higher then i need your endresult to be, i rendered these images at 3200x2400 px, downsizing at the end looks better, sharper, and u have more freedom to smudge in your image whitout it being too visible
This was all there was to the 3D part, by now u might realize that your choice of 3D programm is irrelevant, the steps i took are so basic and simple and any 3D programm is able to perform those actions - more or less.
Now i took my renderings into photoshop to create the glassy look, modify colors, contrasts etc.
That is done by overlaying the various previously made renderings and setting the blending modes to show the favourable charactersitics of each render, if blending alone is not sufficient, than LayerMasks can blend out those parts. But don't delete anything u want not to be visible, using layermasks, you can still change anything later on, (and you will bite ur ass off if u want but realize u can't :)
this is my full ps layer palette for this image. I could have spared some here and there, not as many as there are now are really neccesary, but i like to keep the file as native as possible. Certainly the blending modes are all everything but normal. Naming layers is a must for me, good for u if u can keep everything in your head.
below: 100% view of the feet
So you see, the 3D is not that difficult, but still it is not done with the push of a button, most of the work comes after rendering
I started this image in october 2001 and worked about two weeks on it, discussed it with online friends and left it. In January 2002 i came back and worked over it again, until i was satisfied.