[jfrancis]

edit: image revised... look further down the page...

My first attempt at Maxwell. Everything is virtual except for the model and her corset. The pasties are CG.

The photo is mine. The model's name is 'Apnea.'

The painting texture maps were done in Photoshop and ArtRage. All rendering in Maxwell via Maya plugin.

I didn't want to bump an old topic, but this is a continuation of the overal work plan described in this 2007 thread.

[iker]

I like your image a lot

...but everything seems to be real except the model, she looks like a mannequin ...too much post work on the skin?

[Bubbaloo]

she looks like a mannequin ...too much post work on the skin?

That's what I though too. I thought that the model was the only part of the image that looked CG...

[jfrancis]

I'll take another look. Thanks.

[jfrancis]

Revised file. The image in the original post has been moved, so the link is broken for anyone without it in their cache.

[jfrancis]

Some interesting points -

1) There is no blurring or noise reduction of any kind on the model, now. There was some Neat Image on her before. I thought I was slick doing it only in the dark areas through a luminosity mask, but I also brightened her too much, which made the skin processing more obvious.

2) If she still looks fake, all I have left are color and contrast tweaks. I shot her two years ago, I underexposed the photo and used a wider aperture than I wish I had, so she's noisy and soft, and I never planned until a few weeks ago to extract her from her original background and make a composite image.

3) I made the many random knife throw holes with one single sweep of a Photoshop scatter brush - I created a weight map and bump map from that.

4) I made an image of borads, then high pass filtered it to get wood grain detail. I used the 'Blend If...' function of Photoshop layers to push the darks of the high pass wood through an ArtRage-painted texture.

5) The script is from The Voynich Document (Google has info.) It has no further significance other than to be mysterious.

6) The thread on her corset has a single pixel wide very bright green edge. It is very unexpected, and visible only at a big zoom. I took a single pixel brush and added a similar effect to the spirals in the pasties for subliminal effect.

7) The silhouette edge of the yellow rim was a perfect cylinder. I chewed it up in Photoshop.

[philmartin]

Much Better! What technique did you use to silo the hair?

[jfrancis]

A CG figure stands in as a knife blade reflection and wall shadow casting proxy.

[jfrancis]

Much Better! What technique did you use to silo the hair?

The original image is here:

http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/ ... apnea.html [18+ NSFW zomg boobies]

I had never shot it with later extraction in mind, or I would not have used a bright red wall in direct contact with the model.

However, with the hair, as with all other edges, I inspected the 'coastline' carefully in every channel I could - Lab, RGB, CMYK, whatever I could use, and on a section by section basis I chose the channel with the best wall-to-figure contrast. Then I used levels and the black and white point eyedroppers to force the wall to black and the figure to white.

Sometimes I do things like use no mask at all, just the 'darken' blend mode. That sometimes gets me an edge. Then I mask away from that edge into the proper opaque rest of the figure.

[Bubbaloo]

I love it! Great work!

[jfrancis]

Thank you

[-Adrian]

Nice composition!

[Tea_Bag]

I Love it! Really goods results! Well done jfrancis!

[iker]

Much better now, and touching a bit the levels she looks more alive



...love this image anyway!

[jurX]

Well done.Really nice result!