Story
Once upon a time there was a mouse named Gram Glueypaws who lived in the manor house of a rich granny, Beatrice Sparklington. Every day Gram would leave his burrow, from under the mahogany staircase, to steal some shiny jewels granny Beatrice left around the house.
Until one day, Beatrice saw Gram plodding along her Persian carpet with her best string of pearls. Beatrice shrieked and called her servants to find the rodent. Her servants searched and dug inside the house with pickaxes and shovels. They made many holes and made Beatrice furious.
Until finally, they discovered Gram’s treasure trove. He had collected hundreds of jewels and pearls to decorate his home for his wife and newly born baby mouse, Stephen. Beatrice’s heart melted, remembering her past youth and unrequited wish to have children. She forgave Gram and his grubby paws.
Ever since that day, Beatrice and Gram have been the best of friends. Gram decorates Beatrice’s home, which now looks like swiss cheese, and she helps his family with spare food and jewellery.
The moral of the story is: Never judge someone’s actions, because you don’t know the whole truth.
Technical Details
Art Station Link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3q1vND
Tools: Autodesk Maya and Arnold, Substance Painter
Gram was modelled in Autodesk Maya, textured in Substance Painter and rendered with Arnold Renderer. The face count for the final model is ~40 000 polygons. The material used for all the meshes in the scene is aiStandardSurface, an Arnold specific material, which allows presets like Skin, for realistic skin effects. In the work in progress image below, purple shades were added in the Subsurface Colour sections of the material, with the Skin Preset activated. For the eyes, a circular colour ramp was used to create the iris and pupil.
Lighting was done with Arnold Area Lights, two on the sides, two for the top and bottom and one behind the character. The left hand side light is the key light with an intensity of 350 and a light blue tint. The right hand side light is a fill light with an intensity of 100. The back light is a rim light with an intensity of 500 and a yellow tint. The top and bottom lights have a lower intensity of 50, to fill in any sharp shadows. Two disk lights were also added for the glint in the eyes. Finally a Skydome light with a gradient colour was used for the background. Light Linking was used to remove the influence of some lights from the stage, as it looked overexposed. The Exposure for all the lights was 1.
Texturing was done in Substance Painter. The main material parameters used were Base Colour, Roughness and Height. The overall look aimed for was of a furless mouse who had rolled in sparkly jewels and precious metals for a long time. Looking at him now, he reminds me of a purple coral, a bit rough around the edges, and rather porous.
The render was done at a resolution of 2048 x 2048 with camera samples of 5, Diffuse, Specular and SSS of 3 and Transmission of 2. Ray Depth was a 4 for Diffuse and Specular and 8 for Transmission (although I did not make any parts transparent, so this can be reduced). The render passes used were created using the Render Setup window. This allowed Master (Beauty), Wireframe and Ambient Occlusion layers to be created as it can be seen in the final image below. The stage material was kept the same in all the renders, to offer a contrast from the character.
Anamation 