SaD - About the Cover

I released my first novel two days ago (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XS2Y6QQ) and interestingly, the cover was one of the most challenging parts (see the previous post for a nice look at the cover). I played around with a couple of 2D geometric/graphical ideas and then discarded those in favor of a 3D recreation of one of the characters from the book.

The book is full of plants and animals similar yet dissimilar to those we are currently surrounded by. I wanted to capture a bit of mystery, a bit of familiarity, and a bit of softness and appealing texture. An image came to mind of an animal with a long curved tail, a back, and ears visible almost in silhouette. Perhaps someone else has done this and I subconsciously borrowed the idea, but I think it suits the feel of the novel. If you read the book, you'll know who the character is ( buy it ).

ZBrush is a great tool for messing around with ideas in digital clay, and dynamesh allows you to work without worrying about edge flow, poly counts, or anything technical.

I sculpted out what I thought the hairless version should look like (left), then drew guides for the automatic retopology process (middle) after which I got a decent medium resolution mesh to work with in Maya (right).

I also painted a rough texture on the model in ZBrush, allowing it to be pretty loose and non-photorealistic because it would sit under the fur. It would also define the fur color. Then I unwrapped the UVs and exported the texture to photoshop.

I brought the model into Maya, connected the diffuse texture and set up the camera to match my working illustrator layout.

In order to get the fur on the animal, I had two options in Maya: xgen or the classic fur system. I tried working with xgen, because it is supposed to be the new workflow for fur, hair, and arbitrarily generated primitives (their words). Unfortunately it got the better of me, and I couldn't get colored workable fur. That was the point where I didn't get my cover out and published, and so began the move, the baby, and temporarily putting the project on hold.

More recently I returned to the project and began working with the classic fur system. One might expect that I started with the Racoon preset, but I actually started with the Calico Cat fur preset and did all the tweaks and changes from there.

Maya Fur Preset: Calico Cat

In photoshop, I made modified copies of the diffuse texture to be used as the fur base color, the fur tip color, as well as various grayscale maps to drive properties of the fur itself (length, baldness, bending).

The ears were the most frustrating part, and I created a whole separate fur system just for the rims of the ears. This meant painting even more grayscale maps, but I still found it more intuitive to work with than xgen.

Looks pretty ugly until render time

In terms of lighting, I thought I would need something sophisticated and clever to highlight the fur, but it turns out I was quite happy with a pretty standard Physical Sun and Sky setup, though I made sure to turn off the automatic gamma correction (Linear Workflow all the way).

Once rendered, I did some post-processing in Photoshop. I performed color correction, cleaned up some of the fur manually, added a slight warm back-lit glow to the ear, and made a few other tweaks. Then I assembled it with the text in Illustrator. I used Playfair Display as the typeface and tried to keep the composition nice and simple.

Along the way, I made sure it looked good in grayscale, since many kindle readers are black and white (I mean the devices, not the people...). And that's pretty much it! Oh yeah... nudge: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XS2Y6QQ

Later!
Stuart