CGNetworks Reader Project :: Krishnamurti Martins Costa (aka:Antropus)
Creating "Old Lady"
By: Antropus, Friday, 24 October 2003 :: Page 1 | Page 2

About the image
The "Old Lady" was conceived initially in 3d Studio Max, as it was the program that I was using at that time when I began the production of my short film. After some time, I decided to migrate my entire project to Maya, where the work was practically all redone and improved. This lady is one of the main characters of my short film in progress. She represents the enigmatic element of the movie and she should portray tenderness and fragility but, at the same time, to be frightening (reason of anguish for the plumber). In this image, I tried to emphasize the old lady's fragility, however in the film, the terrifying aspect will be the main ingredient. The style that I have developed for this film, uses the realism and the caricature as keys for the creation of a disturbed look, as it is very detailed in some cases and extremely simple in others. These factors can somewhat inconvenience people when they observe my work.

Modeling
The whole model was made with subdivision surfaces. For the face, I used the poly-by-poly technique and for the remaining, I used the Box modeling technique. I didn't use any direct reference for the development of my characters, but I researched many images of old ladies, wrinkles, varicose veins, stains in the skin and other things. Looking for the models that were most compatible with certain rendering engines, I've tried to maintain the mesh all quads and follow a good topology in the edge loops to facilitate deformations and to define better the models form. Some details of the modeling are reinforced by the bumps I've used in textures. The hair was made entirely with distributed polygons in a random way over the head. Varicose veins and standard veins were modeled and reinforced by the texture maps.