Laura Cosner : Digital Artist

Making of Rebecca

Laura Cosner — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:29:40 +0000

Here is a brief run down on the creation of my Rebecca image. I’m only running down the creation of the head, though the creation of the rest of the image was identical. The hair and eyelashes were both created with painted hair planes, with corresponding transparency maps. The shader for the hat was based off of the MadVelvet shader, with an additional bump map and ramp to create a stronger tooth to the material.

I began with creating the base mesh in Maya, and using Zbrush to create the displacement and bump maps. I also used Zbrush to paint the various textures including the spec and epidermal maps. The maps were also tweaked in photoshop after the Zbrush painting was completed. For the bump map, I created a seperate Ztool for just the skin bump outside of the displacement. This gave me a little more control over the final texture of the skin.

Above you can see the various maps, as well as the final rendered images. The final images were renered in Mental Ray with final gather.

Digital Paintings

Laura Cosner — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 22:10:49 +0000

These paintings were all created in Photoshop and Painter without photo integration.

Los Angeles Vs. Asteroids

Laura Cosner — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:00:59 +0000

These pieces were created as “news stills” for a short in which Los Angeles is destroyed by asteroids. They were all created in Photoshop, through the integration of several different photos.

Background Painting

Laura Cosner — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:43:29 +0000

Background paintings created with photo integration

3d work

Laura Cosner — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 22:12:40 +0000

These pieces utilize Maya, Photoshop, and Zbrush

Children’s Illustrations

Laura Cosner — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:16:05 +0000

2d Educational Work : Illustrator and Photoshop

Laura Cosner — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:12:38 +0000

These illustrations were created for a variety of print publications. Credits to Precision Graphics, McGraw Hill, Norton Publishing, Brooks-Cole Publishing, Barnes & Noble, and Prentice Hall.

Video

Laura Cosner — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:53:00 +0000

My Demo Reel:

This is the project I completed with a group of my fellow Zoic Interns while we were there. I produced the project, as well as created the news still insets and the matte painting:

Smudge Tool Mini-Tutorial

Laura Cosner — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:13:36 +0000

So, a lot of people use the smudge tool to blend things. The main issue with using this tool for blending, is that you tend to lose sharp edges as well as a wide range of values.

Here are some general Smudge Tool Tips:

1) Don’t use the smudge tool for large areas! This will only make everything mushy.
Instead, use large soft brushes at low opacity to build up dark areas or draw in dark “shapes” for shadows and use the Gaussian Blur filter to soften them.

2) Never ever ever use the smudge tool on full strength. This actually works more like the “liquify” filter, and can really mess up your drawing while making everything a big mushy mess.
You can however, use this to your advantage if you want, as I show in one of the steps below.

3) Always make sure you are leaving some edges crisp while smudging

4) Draw back in darker areas and highlight areas to keep a broad range of values

Here’s a little walkthrough using the smudge tool:

: Starting Image : I created this by using the marque tool to draw a circle selection, creating a new layer, filling the circle with a color. I locked the transparency of that layer and used large soft brushes on low opacity to build up the dark areas. I could make a mini tutorial on this step all by itself.

: 1) Draw dark line for crease on new layer. Hard brush, pen pressure set to size

: 2) Using a soft brush, carfully smudge either side of the line selectively leaving some areas more smudged than others

: 3) Select your darkest shadow color. With a sharp brush set to size, draw back in the dark areas. Carefully smudge in the ends of the stroke to blend. Carefully blend in other areas that are drawing attention to themselves. DO NOT over smudge or you’ll have to repeat this step.

: 4) Select your highlight color. With a soft brush with a low opacity and flow, softly brush in the highlights around the edges

: 5) Using a hard smudge tool set at around 80-90%, pinch in edges around the crease selectively to make a “pucker” effect. This of course is totally optional!

: 6) Select a bright highlight color With a hard brush set to size, trace in edges seletively to pop them out

: 7) Using a soft brush with medium strength (50-60%), carefully smudge only the outer edges of the highlights, keeping the inner edges crisp

: With the darkest shadow color in your palette, go back one more time in some of the dark areas. At this point you should have an idea of which areas require the darkest darks, which parts of the crease are the deepest etc. Resist the urge to smudge these! Leave them alone! It’s hard to see in this image, but I added a label where I added this additional color.

The end!