perfect

faces
TRADE SECRETS

A new breed of 3D artist is taking digital portraiture beyond the real in search of a different kind of perfection.
BY OLIVIER PONSONNET
In this special showcase, one artist reveals the creative decisions that underpin his work
hen I create a portrait, I dont just use

the idea of putting a monkey on the characters shoulder, but

photo-reference from one or two faces,

nally decided to concentrate more on her face instead.

instead I try to pick out elements that

I nd beautiful, such as a particular

mouth or eye shape. Im not looking to create perfect

version of female beauty. I then said to myself, OK, lets try

real models. Once I get a clean mesh with correct

to do something better, something more beautiful.

proportions, I prefer to follow my feelings and intuition,

Olivier Ponsonnet is a 3D artist at Asobo
Studio, where he specialises in lighting and
rendering work for video games
http://re1v.free.fr

I also get my motivation from other artists. I saw a great

picture by a Korean artist which really captured a particular

trying to make something appealing.

With the picture to the right, Moon Key, I tried to give the

The idea here was to create a mixed-race portrait, so

I started with darker skin tones, with touches of green and
orange. Thats why the blue lighting naturally came up. This

characters face charm. I wasnt aiming for extreme realism.

colour offers a good contrast with the skin tones and

This kind of semi-realistic rendering is not a goal in itself, but

highlights it perfectly. I also decided to add more details to

a means to give credibility to the character. I try to make my

the character by giving her accessories. I wanted to get

characters believable and bring them closer to the spectator,

something light almost ethereal always with this idea

but I dont want them to be too realistic Im after something

of the moon and dreams in my mind. So I attached a special

unusual and more aesthetic than a real human face.

necklace, with this moon key on it. The name came from the

This picture is a completely personal piece of work in

discarded monkey idea, but also from this soft, blue and light

which my aim was mainly aesthetic. I tried to express beauty

aspect I wanted to give to this character, with the blue tones

through the facial features of the Moon Key character. To

of the lighting reminiscent of moonlight.

achieve this goal, I tried to mix several ethnicities in her face.

Most of the work here is done in 3ds Max. In Photoshop,

With Moon Key, I mixed a Caucasian face with an African

I only apply a colour-correction lter, nothing more. No details

face, which resulted in this sort of Indian face. I toyed with

are added in postproduction.

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Olivier Ponsonnet | TUTORIALS

MOON KEY | Making the most of lighting

Luminous skin
For the skin, Ive used the classic maps diffuse,
specular and bump with a fast skin shader,
simulating light spreading through the skin to make it look
softer and smoother. Due to the ethnic mix, the diffuse
colour map is darker than the ones I usually use, so most of
the light is produced by the specular. Its lighter and more
glossy than those Id use for a Caucasian person.

02

Lighting scheme
All the lights used in this picture are area lights,
simulating the lights used by photographers: you
get softer shadows and smoother lighting. Theres one key
light in the upper right, in front of the character, with a
neutral colour. Theres a blue rim light on the left, used to get
specular on the face, to highlight its shape. And theres a
huge frontal light, spreading a ll light over the character.

01

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TUTORIALS | Olivier Ponsonnet

CHRYSOPALE | Creating realistic textures

Convincing eye make-up

To get the glittering effect on the make-up, I use
a strong and glossy specular with a noisy speckled
specular map on this part. The glittering on the cheeks
underneath is due to a strong specular, used to counterbalance the diffuse map. For the purple eye make-up, I also
add a slight bloom around the eyes, and this was painted on
the diffuse map.

01

Realistic skin
Every single map contributes to making the skin
texture realistic. The diffuse channel is important to
add colour variations and irregularities, but its the bump that
creates the small details, especially pores on the face. Thats
why I usually work with a bump map thats twice the resolution
of the diffuse or specular map. The maps are hand-painted with
a graphic tablet, and are not based on photographs.

02

EVERY SINGLE MAP

CONTRIBUTES TO
MAKING THE SKIN
TEXTURE REALISTIC
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Olivier Ponsonnet | TUTORIALS

SHADE | Enhancing your portrait through details

Rendering the eyes

The eye is such a special part that I usually model
each one with two concentric spheres. The rst
sphere, which is slightly larger, is used to add sparkle: youve
got to make this mesh fully transparent and reect the
environment ideally an HDR map with strong light spots or,
more basically, a simple, self-illuminated white sphere only
visible through reection. The inner sphere (fully opaque,
with your diffuse colour map applied) should look smooth,
almost blending with the rest of the eye area. You can
achieve this by using a sub-surface scattering shader. With
this kind of material, the light that spreads over or through
the skin will contribute to the eye lighting, and vice versa.

01

Contrasting the skin against clothes

To help differentiate the skin and materials like
cloth and jewellery, I try to keep something really
organic on one side, with the skin maps and their random
irregularities; and on the other side, I make more symmetrybased textures for the costume. The costume colours are
also really different from the skin tones: in Moon Key, the
jewellery and cloth are cold with blue and purple colours,
whereas the skin tones are warmer. Here, its a more
straightforward light and dark contrast. I always try to get
this contrast to highlight my characters inside the picture.

02

I ALWAYS TRY
TO GET CONTRAST
TO HIGHLIGHT MY
CHARACTERS INSIDE
THE PICTURE
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