Samus Aran - Take Control

Old model, new work.

Upon hearing about a fan based art contest over at IGN's message boards, I decided to try and put something together to enter. The contest deals with the impending release of the Nintendo Wii. The rules were to create an illustration of a videogame character (nintendo or otherwise) holding/using the controller for the new nintedo system. Being extremely busy at the moment, I didn't really have the time to do much. However, I remembered the old Samus Aran model I had (one of my first maya works) and thought I could do something with that.

I really liked the idea of Samus "giving" the new controller to the viewer. So I came up with a pose I liked, and I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with. The model needed a lot of work, as it's pretty poorly done (the hand wasn't even modelled to have the fingers bend), but I was able to get it working well enough.

The model was rendered with HDRI and Mental Ray. This was also one of my first times I relied heavily on render layers. Rather than just render the image out in one pass, I did several, one for shadows, one for specular highlights, one for the glowing lights and so on. Then I composted them back together in photoshop. The main advantage of this is it allows me to tweak any layer individually in photoshop.

I may tweak this a bit before the final submission date, but for 2 days work, I'm pleased with what I got.