CGSociety - Open Green

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Announcing the Public PreSale of EXOTIQUE 4, CGSociety presents the Making of ‘Open Green’ by Andrius Balciunas.

CGSociety :: Tutorial, Andrius Balciunas

Lithuanian artist Andrius Balciunas’ ‘Open Green’ is featured as a spread on page 74-75 of EXOTIQUE 4, now on public PreSale. Order your copy today, to ensure it is delivered the moment it becomes available.

Introduction
Everything began when I saw a photo of a leaf placed on a hand. It seemed like such a simple image, but because of the professional lighting, the style, colors or my mood that day, it looked really beautiful and cozy. The green color of a leaf and the color of the skin worked so well, it was very pleasing to watch. So it really boosted my inspiration and motivated me start to develop something of my own.

Sketches
It was interesting to start a project with just two colors. I began to splash digital paint around with a simple soft brush picking shades of green and warm light brown, to develop the mood I wanted. When I had something that resembled the mood I was seeking, I knew I should keep moving this way. I knew I wanted to create a girl wearing green. The idea of dressing her up with delicate chains and a big glass ball pendant on her back came to me later. The name ‘Open Green’ came to me naturally.

Modeling
I started collecting references of various girls on the web. In the end I chose one particular image of Adriana Karembeu. She is very gorgeous and I decided I wanted someone that looked like her. I started with my ‘default’ low poly base mesh which I modify and change to suit my projects.

I rigged the model in Biped and started to make the desired pose. After that I began to tweak, change proportions and generally fine-tune the model. This stage was critical and I spent most of the time on it. This part was done on a very old laptop, when I was away on holiday. When I returned home I moved her to ZBrush to complete further anatomical correction. I really wanted to make her look correct, natural and very beautiful.

Making cloth falling on her arms was a really interesting part. First I thought of sculpting it, but later I decided to do a video simulation. The main problem was that her body needed to catch that cloth so it would naturally simulate on her.

So I made a morph between the “catch” pose and the original pose, seen here in the video.

I needed to tweak a lot of morph timing and simulation parameters, but what I’ve created in the end was natural looking and a perfectly unwrapped cloth.

I thought of doing a simulation for the necklace chain paths too, but it turned out it gave me much more control by doing them myself.