The Barbershop: A Stylized Artwork by Alex Trevino
My style is something I’m still defining with each new project I do, but it has a lot of inspiration from stop-motion and anime.
I take the theatrical lighting and cartoonish textures from stop motion. I use movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline, and Fantastic Mr. Fox as inspiration. And the high amount of detail to create a scene in anime movies like Akira, Howl's Moving Castle, and Redline.
The Substance 3D team contacted me to create a new project. Usually, the clients tell me what I must do, but in this case, I had the privilege to decide what to do, and I was pleased about that. So I started to look for some exciting concepts to show to the Substance 3D team and decide together what would be the concept to do.
I put together several concepts that were very interesting to me. Specifically, one from Nikolai Lockertsen – the most complex of them all – appealed to me because it was a fascinating dynamic shot with a Dutch camera angle and an anamorphic aspect ratio. I knew this was a challenge worth achieving, and the characters’ anatomy, the fire effect on the sword and the hair motivated me to learn new techniques.
Using the Substance 3D tools
The benefits of using the Substance 3D tools are concrete. The integration with other programs. The ease of use. The libraries of materials and masks. And seeing the assets in real-time while texturing and making a high-quality render with Iray is priceless.
I used seven programs in this project. PureRef to gather texture and shot references. Blender for modeling and rendering the project. EmberGen to create fire and steam the coffee. Painter to create all the textures. Designer to create all the seamless patterns. Illustrator to create alphas. And Photoshop for the post-production of the render.
The main takeaways were identifying obstacles, having the patience to solve them, and understanding that every project will have anticipated and unexpected problems.
For example, I had memory limit issues when rendering. The memory required to render if you use 16-bit files (EXR or TIF) is higher than if you use 8-bit files (PNG or JPG). Instead of reducing the quality or size of the textures, I reduced the number of particles in the scene, which was the easiest way to lower memory usage. Also, making the hair was challenging, but instead of just making one version, I made several versions and chose one. Usually, the last versions were the best ones.
