Romain Chauliac has recently launched a Pokemon Contest on his Discord channel and to show an example of what’s expected, the artist created one nice creature in 3 days.
Romain Chauliac has recently launched a Pokemon Contest on his Discord channel and to show an example of what’s expected, the artist created one nice creature in 3 days. The thing is that Romain decided to upload a tutorial that shows a way you can turn a concept into a beautiful image without losing time on useless technical things.
The guide shows how to use Maya 2018, Arnold 5, Megascans, and ShadeIt in order to quickly build the scene and set the lighting. The 3-hour video features tips on scattering the moss with Xgen and some final touches like volumetric fog. Please note that this is not a beginner’s guide.
We’ve contacted Romain to learn more about his Pokemon initiative. Here are his thoughts:
On my Discord I launched a Pokemon-Contest and, in order to show an example, I decided to create one in only 3 days!
R&D:
The main difficulty on this theme is to translate a simple Pokemon drawing with tiny lines, simple shapes and a single point of view into a realistic creature who could live in our world.
So, before taking the time to create a big and complex Pokemon, I wanted to experiment and try to find the right mood on a simple one.
I’ve had an idea, I tested it and in less than one hour I got the right feeling and decided to spend 3 days to make an entire image.
Then, thanks to my script ShadeIt, I quickly set shaders and lighting environment.
Technical:
The main technical difficulty was for scattering the moss. It’s always been a problem for scattering instances in Maya (I dream about a Forest Pack for Maya).
First, I tried MASH and its world ecosystem node which is great to populate and precisely control instance. But for thousands of moss’s instances, it’s not ideal.
I finally found a good and quick solution with XGen.
Community feedback:
On the compositing, I hesitated between orange or blue tones. When you work alone a community is really helpful when it comes to feedback. I asked for votes on my Discord and they helped me choose and advise me to go further with orange fog, which is definitely a great idea!
Join Us:
To share my progress with my community and those who also participate in the contest I did everything live on my Twitch channel. So I invite you to follow me to see the next pokemon creation!
It was a really fun image to do and I am already thinking about my next Pokemon to catch! So I invite artists to join us on the Pokemon Contest on my Discord. We help each other and, in the end, the idea is to make an image which will bring together all the created Pokemon!