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Personal project about the stupidity in social networks
networks. We all know this: reading posts and think:
"damn...use your brain and think about it!" Its the
Time where questioning something is pretty rare.
Believing everything you read, seems to be the
new easy way of thinking?

A project i did in the spare time between projects,
so its hard to define the working time. I think
personal projects are also made for testing new
things, learn new technics etc. its the first time i
used Zbrush on production, in very small details
to break up the perfect looking CGish clean
geometry of a shape. Also in materials, my goal
was to get some semi realistic shaders with an
illustrative lookand feel.
Hope you like it and thanks for watching!

Most of the 3D work was done in 3DS Max and final rendered with Vray.

The objects where lit with standard Vray-Lights. One Dome light for the environment, one Key light form top left, a Rim light from bottom right, one Sphere light inside the mailbox and 2 lights wich only includes the brain to get some nice highlights.

The geometry is some usual basic subdivision, hardsurface modeling, with refinement in Zbrush to get rid of the perfect edges and surfaces. The brain was a stock model i "melted" in Zbrush using some basic brushes like Snakehook, move etc.

All textures are based on photographs wich where edited in Photoshop to generate all the maps like reflect, specular, bump...and so on.

Below you can see some of the test renders i did after collecting some google reference pictures for the overall look and feel.

Here you can see the Max -> Zbrush -> Max workflow. The parts where exported as OBJ files into Zbrush, after sculpting and decimation, back imported into Max + some displacement:

The Shaders aren't that complex like the might look. Here is an example of the Wood, used on the Pillar. The overall technic for the other shaders is pretty the same, using a Vray blend material with different sub materials for base shaders, dirt, damage etc. For the brain i used the same technic but with 2 blended Vray fast SSS2 shaders and one normal vray Material. The social network sticker were pretty tough for me, first i wanted them to be geometry but i wat was pretty hard for me to get them placed on the bend surface. later in the process i desided to use them as a texture with some displacment maps.

Below you see a screenshot from the slate editor with the discription:

Final rendering: The final render was pretty big, 4000 pixels on the long edge and took over 15 hours on my dual cpu workstation. i reduced the shader quality for the ivys and the wood a but, since i wanted to apply DOF later on in photoshop and there were almost not visible in the sharpzone. everything was rendered out in passes, beside the usual ones, i added 2 ambient occlusion passes with the help of the Vray extra tex pass. All files where saved as openEXR at 32 Bit.

After the import of the EXR files and correct alignment and blending, i converted all the layers to a smartobject inside Photoshop. after that i changed to 16 bit, for further manipulation and correction. there isnt that much post work on it. below you can see 4 steps during the process of retouching, the first image is the raw render. with help of the object id pass i made selection masks for all objects and assigned them to a layergroup.

The brain was a bit tough, i dont wanted to get a mix of a realstic and illustrative, interessting looking feel. after rendering i noticed that it looked pretty boring, and less shiny than i wanted it. so i rendered the brain again, but with a simple black Vray material with different layers of glossyness. then i just droped it in photoshop, negative multiply and did some minor color corrections to it.

The Depth of field was done in post. I know you can get a slightly nicer and more realistic result in rendering but in my opinion its more efficiant to do in post with the help of a Z-depth pass.

Almost Done! For the color grading i just used curves for the luminance, as well as some color lookups and dropped down the intensity. at least i droped a selective color correction on top