perfect

faces W
TRADE SECRETS

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

hen I create a portrait, I don’t just use

● Olivier Ponsonnet is a 3D artist at Asobo
Studio, where he specialises in lighting and
rendering work for video games
http://re1v.free.fr
photo-reference from one or two faces,
instead I try to pick out elements that
I find beautiful, such as a particular
mouth or eye shape. I’m not looking to create perfect
real models. Once I get a clean mesh with correct
proportions, I prefer to follow my feelings and intuition,
trying to make something appealing.
With the picture to the right, ‘Moon Key’, I tried to give the
character’s face charm. I wasn’t aiming for extreme realism.
This kind of semi-realistic rendering is not a goal in itself, but
a means to give credibility to the character. I try to make my
characters believable and bring them closer to the spectator,
but I don’t want them to be too realistic – I’m after something
unusual and more aesthetic than a real human face.
This picture is a completely personal piece of work in
which my aim was mainly aesthetic. I tried to express beauty
through the facial features of the Moon Key character. To
achieve this goal, I tried to mix several ethnicities in her face.
With ‘Moon Key’, I mixed a Caucasian face with an African
face, which resulted in this sort of Indian face. I toyed with
the idea of putting a monkey on the character’s shoulder, but
finally decided to concentrate more on her face instead.
I also get my motivation from other artists. I saw a great
picture by a Korean artist which really captured a particular
version of female beauty. I then said to myself, “OK, let’s try
to do something better, something more beautiful.”
The idea here was to create a mixed-race portrait, so
I started with darker skin tones, with touches of green and
orange. That’s why the blue lighting naturally came up. This
colour offers a good contrast with the skin tones and
highlights it perfectly. I also decided to add more details to
the character by giving her accessories. I wanted to get
something light – almost ethereal – always with this idea
of the moon and dreams in my mind. So I attached a special
necklace, with this ‘moon key’ on it. The name came from the
discarded monkey idea, but also from this soft, blue and light
aspect I wanted to give to this character, with the blue tones
of the lighting reminiscent of moonlight.
Most of the work here is done in 3ds Max. In Photoshop,
I only apply a colour-correction filter, nothing more. No details
are added in postproduction.

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MOON KEY | Making the most of lighting
Lighting scheme
01 All the lights used in this picture are area lights,
simulating the lights used by photographers: you
get softer shadows and smoother lighting. There’s one key
light in the upper right, in front of the character, with a
neutral colour. There’s a blue rim light on the left, used to get
specular on the face, to highlight its shape. And there’s a
huge frontal light, spreading a fill light over the character.
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Olivier Ponsonnet | TUTORIALS
Luminous skin
02 For the skin, I’ve 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. It’s lighter and more
▲
glossy than those I’d use for a Caucasian person.
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 TUTORIALS | Olivier Ponsonnet

CHRYSOPALE | Creating realistic textures

Convincing eye make-up

01 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 counter-
balance 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.

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

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

01 The eye is such a special part that I usually model
each one with two concentric spheres. The first
sphere, which is slightly larger, is used to add sparkle: you’ve
got to make this mesh fully transparent and reflect the
environment – ideally an HDR map with strong light spots or,
more basically, a simple, self-illuminated white sphere only
visible through reflection. 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.

Contrasting the skin against clothes

02 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 symmetry-
based 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, it’s a more
straightforward light and dark contrast. I always try to get
this contrast to highlight my characters inside the picture.

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

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