Part I - Modeling, Textures & Materials

This article will cover the technical aspects in the making of my piece Starry Night. I hope you will find this project overview useful. Maybe you'll even learn something new and be inspired in your own work. Part 1 of 3 parts covers modeling, texturing and materials.

Modeling

I might as well start of with a confession. My modeling isn't anywhere near perfect at all. It was so bad it became a quite time consuming factor in the the project, constantly needing fixes. So I ended up struggling for many hours with the meshes because of the poor modeling. I've learned the hard way that good edge loops and careful modeling is much preferable. Don't make the same mistakes I did! Take your time and care with modeling the way many tutorials suggest you do - there is a good reason so many stress this. With that being said, let's carry on.

The boy's head

I modeled the head without any references but the way I pictured it in my head. I started out with a sphere (subdivided cube) and just began manipulating the vertices around, subdividing and extruding faces. I didn't really pay as much attention to edge loops as one ought to. Don't try this at home! It's way too problematic! The ears were due to laziness (my biggest enemy) snatched from an old project of mine and were manipulated and improved a little upon to fit the head.

The boy's expression went through many iterations. Things like eyelids, eyebrows, mouth, nose, ears, even the size of the pupil, all affect how the expression looks and feels. I had to spend much time gazing into the mirror to get the right expression.

Pajamas shirt

The pajamas proved to be quite a challenge to get right. I got my hands on a real life pajamas and had a look at how the seams were arranged. I then modeled a toony version of this, with little softer seams than its real life counterpart has.

I eventually rigged the shirt for a more dynamic work flow, and therefore I had to look at the real pajamas yet again to see how it stretched and creased when worn. I have a cupboard door mirror in my room, so I was able to get up and stand in the desired pose in front of the mirror to be sure to get the whole pose right as well as the look of the cloth.

Teddy bear

The teddy bear was modeled quite late in the process because its a background prop, and also isn't very detailed. I rigged the teddy bear with a deformed human rig that fits a teddy bear. A "teddy rig".

Finished modeling

There are a few other objects in the scene apart from those mentioned above: A pair of eyes (modeled following the great tutorial Creating Pixar-looking eyes in Blender), the background - consisting of a simple plane and a modified version on top of it where some parts of it are removed/sunken down, in that way creating areas of moss. With all elements in place, the final modeling looks like below.

Texturing

Blender got a completely new material system in version 2.42 based on nodes. This project didn't take complete advantage of that new system (only in a few areas), so some of the methods below might become a bit outdated in the future.

Pajamas patterns and creases

The pajamas pattern is done entirely with a wood procedural and some color ramp work. Apart from that, I painted a bump map to add creases of the fabric in the right areas.

One thing to keep in mind when painting a map like the one below is the flow. You can't have two lines crossing each other with anywhere near a 90 degree angle(except in areas where the fabric is very stretched or manipulated i.e. in this case around the elbow area on each sleeve). While painting the bump map I always took a good look at references for creases - myself and my own shirt.  It's always good to have plenty of reference to go by. Photos are good, and often the only way to go, but having the real object with you while you work is even better.

Materials

When the textures (procedural as well as image based) have been configured the last thing left to do is to handle some overall settings on how the material behaves with light. This is called shading. There are a few materials from this project I would like to highlight due to their special shading qualities. This image challenged me with materials like cloth (cotton) and human skin that are very tough to get right. I don't claim I got them to look right, but I tried my best.

Cloth

There isn't much info on how to do cloth material on the internet, and what is there is very concise. This became quite a challenge for me to do, and I ended up with a solution I'm not sure is usable in any other cases than in this specific image, but it's worth mentioning anyway.

I started out with trying to understand the sheer physical aspects of cotton. I once again grabbed the real life pajamas and put it as close to my eyes as I possibly could, without losing focus (I didn't have a magnifying glass at hand). I quickly found out some basic stuff about the material: It consists of rows of tight cotton thread, each separated by much wider rows of weaved zig-zag patterns. On top of that is some random clustered thin threads, giving the material tiny clumps of thread spread out all over it. The more prominent the last is, the softer/fluffier the cloth appears.

I made a quick procedural map, similar to the one that made up the pajamas pattern, and manipulated it to make these microscopic rows of woven cotton. On top of that, some overexposed cloud procedurals were going to add the fluffy clusters. But maps and textures alone couldn't do the whole thing.

I knew taking too much time doing the pattern would be somewhat pointless, since it was going to be to small to really see anyway. I had to put more focus on some of the larger settings to produce a cloth like material; shading. By changing the diffuse shading mode to Minnaert the light reacts with the material in a more cloth-like way. I then added a color ramp along the normal space (with the new material node system to have more control) to make the edges of the cloth appear lighter and more back lit. It's not too much, but just enough to give a slightly more cloth like appearance.

Human skin

Human skin is very hard to do. The (quite famous among 3D artists) phenomena subsurface scattering (abbreviated SSS) is essential to it, and yet impossible to do in Blender [at the time this project was done - it is in newer versions of Blender!]. I had to fake it, and the material node system gave me a better chance of doing this than ever before.

Before I made my material I had a look at how others have done it before, and liked Tommy Helgevold (JoOngle)'s node setup (as described in this thread at the Blender Artist Forums) - I just wanted a more subtle effect.

So I started doing my own material loosely based on his. I started by setting the diffuse shading to Oren-Nayar (gives a little more smooth/wax like appearance), and then setting up the nodes as above. The trick in this setup is to make a little portion of the half-shadow area glow just a bit. That's exactly what the vector curves node is doing (applying this on X only, so that it gets a nice reddish color as well). On top of that is once again a color ramp along the normals (can't have to many of those). Since the scene is very low lit I don't need very high values on the effect.

That wraps up part 1 of this article. Next up is part 2 where I take a look at lighting and rendering the scene.
Making of Starry Night | Part II: Lighting & Rendering
Making of Starry Night | Part III: Compositing, Adjustments & Final Touches

//Mathias

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Have you found something not making sense, spelling mistakes or typos? Or have you got any questions that you feel I didn't answer? Contact me, and I'll try to see if I can help you/improve upon this.

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