Making Of

My original idea was to create a realistic mummy, but also one that wasn't scary. I wanted to use place him in typical every day situations, outside the serious and terrifying situation in which a mummy is usually thought of. My aim was to create an interesting and funny character, but at the same time to emphasize that the situations weren’t the normal ones you would expect to find him in. Once I created him, the first situation which came to my mind was the mummy tripping over its bandages.

References

Before starting with the creation of the mummy I looked for images that inspired me and gave me interesting ideas I could reinterpret. I look for ideas for, not only shapes, but also for framing, lighting and everything that an image can communicate. This is an important step for creating any character and image. This is what I call image Googling!

Carry out

I started out with simple forms and added the details later. Usually, I start from a cube or from a single face to create then the base geometry with as few polygons as possible. This way it is easy to keep in order the mesh of the model. Little by little you get near to a low poly-humanoid figure. Next, once it has been rigged the edge loops, you have to define the points in which it’s going to be deformed. The edge loops are very important. For example, they are necessary in order to arrange for an elbow to react correctly in every point once it has been bent.

Another very important thing: you have to maintain your model “all quad,” that is all the polygons of the model have to have 4 sides. This is useful in it allows for better handling of the rig and for a better compatibility between the many sculpting programs.
Once I finished my model, I exported it into .obj so that I could handle it in ZBrush. This allowed me to more easily draw veins, muscles and all the things which would be difficult to create in polygons.

After getting to the level desired, you can export a displace-map and apply it to the mesh you had modeled before. In this way you can obtain a light model in the rig- and animation phase, but at the same with a very high detail in render. Another advantage is that you can modify it very easily with any photo editing program.

Rigging

As for the rig, I use Biped by Max; it is really good for creating humanoid forms. The greatest difficulty for this piece was creating the bends in such a way that they could follow the model without “getting crazy.” In the rig I had to spend a lot of time weighing other single unmanageable vertexes, using a lot Skin Morph to handle the difficult situations.

Texture

Thanks to the Unwrap, which is made to manage the sculpting program, I was able to change to a photo editing program to paint the textures I needed. I was always at the same time in Multiply la Bitmap (made by Unwrap) in order to follow exactly the shape of the model developed on that level.

The useful textures are: the level diffuse, specular, bump and the one obtained from the sculpting of the displace.
The diffuse is the level that is going to draw the skin of the character, the specular is useful in defining the points in which the shader of the model will reflect more or less, basing on a gray scale, even if one uses sometimes a lightly blue-tinted gradation to give a reflecting effect.T he bump is the map which forms, always with a w/b scale, a little roughness on the shader, which was very useful in giving the impression of an old skin.

Shader

The shaker of the skin was realized trying to maintain certain features, such as the dryness of the mummy skin and also the funny and cartoonlike appearance I wanted to obtain. I tried to maintain a high level of subsurface scattering to take away the seriousness of the character and give him, at the same time, a certain concreteness. I had to make a lot of trials before I was satisfied with the result. The real challenge was being able to give it concreteness without giving it horror like details. The final secret was rendering it translucent, just like cartoons, and adding a lot of specular and light strokes to allow certain areas emerge
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Morpher


With the model finished and textured, I made a series of morphs, cloning the main mesh and giving every clone a different detail, like closed eyes or a smile. Each of these features gave life to the mummy.

Lighting

In the first image I created the classical situation in the pyramid, but with a less dark and friendlier lighting letting you in right away. There is a direct yellow light and I played with the classical feature in which the less lighted area is blue. Of course, I tried to give the entire scene an orange tone to communicate cheerfulness.

Sitting and framing

In the second image I wanted to create another unusual situation, i.e. in the bathroom. I tried to show the mummy embarrassed, as if he were just seen by a person at the door. That is also why it's done with wide angle framing. Fortunately, the rid has managed very well. Even in this scene in which the anthropoid model tends to have problems, above all with the pelvis and with the legs. I think it is very important to avoid symmetry. Otherwise, the eyes tend to rove around the scene always finding new things, like crooked feet or a bent back.

Lighting Part2

I put some planks or something like that in front of the light coming into the bathroom. I wanted to break the light coming in to create a shadow-light effect to let the composition quiver better. I also added a blue light, with the decay activated, to lighten just a bit yet not the entire area. That was very difficult. I then put more brightness closer to the observer just to create a snap shot effect.

Environment

I prefer an environment rich in details instead of a classical clean 3D interior. I looked for references for bathrooms and tiles and as I found the right ones I preferred modeling them rather than using a simple bump or displace in order to have a better control of the reflections. Also, in this case I wanted to take a tile away or to dirty another one with various textures just not to have symmetry, as I explained before. I also later added some water just to have more reflections and light-strokes.

Render

I did the render in many steps: beauty pass of the environment, beauty pass of the mummy, ambient occlusion, specular, Z-depth to simulate the depth of field and then many more steps to stress or to decrease reflections and light-strokes. The ambient occlusion, very useful in the environments, is vital to the character because it stresses the model and creates all the little shadow areas which would get lost in the main context. I used a 2000*1600 resolution but, thanks to the various phases, every step was shorter than 5 minutes.

Compositing

After all that, I started compositing it with photo editing programs like Photoshop, unifying all of the levels and weighing them out as you like. The ambient occlusion has to be rendered in Multiply and I kept it to 60% not to weigh the shadows down too much. I then duplicated the beauty pass and I inserted it blurred in screen, thwarting it a little to light some areas up in order to give a burnt film effect. The compositing can change an image drastically and it’s a up to each person to use it in the best possible way.

I finished up this piece using Photoshop to fix the problems and stress what we are interested in the most in the image.