Dark Knight`s revenge is a tribute made just for fun for one of my favourite DC comic superheroes. The main source of inspiration, apart the general imagery of Batman`s comics, movies and so on, was the wonderful short movie “Batman: Dead End“ by Sandy Collora.
I loved Sandy`s realistic vision of Batman`s costume and the dark and dirty mood of the film, so I decided to keep that realistic aspect in 3D, emphasizing even more Bruce Wayne`s dark side. So I took elements from Batman`s iconography assembling them according to my personal tastes of how I like him.
I chose not to have a traditional beefy Batman, but instead generated a more athletic and slim body. The blood stains on his weapon were meant to strength the “revenge“ idea, because my very first idea was that he had a weapon in one hand and the joker`s head in another. But I abandoned soon that because was too blood-thirsty. The blooded weapon still remains to suggest the “revenge“.
The first step I did was to quickly conceptualize in Photoshop the overall mood of the final picture, the pose and the background, I wanted him to look in anger, kind of desperate at the end of a brutal fight. I even wanted to not depict him in the traditional dark bluish mood and hidden by shadows we’ve seen in movies and comics, preferring more a dramatic contrast between warm reddish/orange tones and cold blue/purple tones, putting him in direct light to best display all the realistic details I wanted to show.
I started to model the Batman in a neutral pose with subdivision polygonal modeling technique in 3ds max 7.0. I also took a lot of anatomic references first, to help me with proportions and detail of the body and many others for the batman costumes/gear. I took some nice body and face references from www.3d.sk and decided to give him a physiognomy inbetween Michael Keaton’s appearance and Val Kilmer.
The first step of modelling was already pretty detailed, but I wanted it to push it to be even further, so I decided to do all the fine detail (wrinkles, costume bump and such) in ZBrush and to let max render all this detail in the form of normal maps. The choice of normal maps instead of bump or displacement is because they are finally supported in rendering in Max 7, and for a still image they’re a great compromise between the quick low quality of a bump map and the performance expensive quality of displacement.
In order to do this I had to carefully UV map all the mesh parts I wanted to details, export them one by one in OBJ, import the OBJs in ZBrush, detail and generate some normal maps to be assigned in the bump channel of the max`s materials (the material structure to obtain this is displayed in some pictures later – texturing and lighting section).
