Tripod
Another model from something that sits on my desk,
Zombified Sexy Nurse
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Bread, Love and Health Care
That’s the title of the Italian billboard ad for the health care system, referenced from the movie Pane, Amore e Fantasia, it was quite criticized. The stereotyped sexy nurse with a big smile, kinda creepy I might say, suggests that everything is fine and that “we take care of you”, is it so? Mmm, also looking at the white cross with a red background, that actually looks more like the swiss flag, the Red Cross logo in fact is the other way around, red on white.
Considering the facts that two teenage girls recently died in the hospital after minor surgeries, and the overall problems around the whole system, make this ad appears as an insult to those Italians that struggle everyday with bureaucracy, low incomes, high food prices and least but not last, health care.
The reason I altered the ad came after the request from a fellow blogger, I happily agreed to photoshop it and I think in this case the zombified nurse underlines perfectly the message perceived by many.
The Zombify Process
First thing was gathering ideas, how is she gonna look like? Rotten flesh, exposed skull, blood and a creepy smile, what is a zombie without blood and decaying skin? Once the main idea was rolled out it was time to collect reference material, since there are no real zombies around I googled zombie and skull and luckily the first images that came out were perfect, a guy in Halloween zombie makeup with blood all over his face, a gal with pale skin and white contact lenses, and a frontal view of a skull.
Opened up the ad image in Photoshop I started by duplicating the original layer in a new one by pressing Ctrl + j, never ever work directly on the original, next with the lasso tool I selected the the teeth and again Ctrl +j to take them to a layer. on their own
I worked on the teeth with a 2 pixels brush and 30% opacity, alternating orange/yellow and red/pink colors to add dirt, decay and holes on the teeth surface, than with the liquify filter I deformed and misshaped them a bit.
Next I moved on the lips, the guy in the Halloween outfit I found on Google had a nice bloody mouth so I draw a selection around the bloody chin and lips and pasted them in new layers above the nurse layer. Since I try to work in a non destructive way as much as possible, that means no eraser to remove part and lots of adjustment layers for color correction/hue/levels etc, I created a vector mask and by painting with black I remove the unnecessary parts, by doing this I can alway restore what was removed by painting with white in the vector mask to reveal the needed areas.
To conform the blood to the lower lip of the nurse and the shape of her chin I went back into the liquify filter, same thing for the upper lip, setting the blending mode to “Darker Color” halped too.
Basically this is the same process for all other parts, the skull, the eye etc. Only the growing veins were added in a second moment with After Effects. When everything was done in photoshop I saved different stages of the nurse, one with only the rotten teeth, another one with the bloody mouth and one more with the final image.
The Animating Process
It was done in After Effects, I loaded the photoshop files in a new comp, stacked them up in the time line according to their completeness, clean image at the bottom, nasty teeth in the middle and the zombie on top. Key framing opacity of the different layer with some mask to reveal partial areas of the various images was the overall trick, I made the growing veins with the paint tool, the coll part of this tool is that the stroke is animatable over time, so I simply painted each vein, from the thicker to the smallest and key framed all of them over few frames to give the impression of growing.
Finally added the credits and some sound fx, not much cause I could not find a proper sound for the whole clip, actually I was running out of ideas and time 
but it was fun.
In the blue sky
I liked how the shadow moves across the image and designs a curve in the opposite direction of the reflective metal thing giving a decent balance to the image. Very simple, maybe the only distraction to the yey is cause by the inner reflection of the object. This render was made with an early beta version of Splutterfish Brazil R/S, some setting were cranked up all the way to make a clean and noise free render, however as I can remember the render time was something I’d like not to talk about! 
Let’s keep in mind the size of the images was 1600×1200 and the machine was an AMD Athlon 900Mhz with 512 MB of ram. For the blu reflections I use Dreamscape and set up a sikple sky with no clouds, some minor tweaks in photoshop to intensyfy the contrast.
USB pen drive
These USB pen drives were modeled in Rhino and rendered in 3d Max (vray), I used my pen drive as reference, took some pictures, aligned them in photoshop and loaded as background reference in Rhino. It’s always good to work with a reference in order to keep the right proportions. The model was quite simple, basically a bunch of boxes, fillets and extruded lines.
Very simple materials were used, a medium gray with glossy reflections for the body, glossy reflections and refractions for the plastic cap and a subtle bump map for the sticker.
I’m amaze how pen drives became so popular among people that actually don’t really need them, I guess they make them feel more up-to-date and geeky. Honestly I like these little solid state memories, I have to admit that 128 MB is kinda small (now upgraded to a 4 GB ), considering that I found it on the ground along a road with cars running all over it I can’t complain. They are strong too, I was surprised it worked without a hitch, it even end up a couple of time in the washer and came out nice and tidy, once dry I plugged in and all my data was still there, now is loaded with Damn Small Linux, this way I have a portable operating system, it comes handy whenever XP decides that it’s time to give up on life and you need to rescue your data before a new install, and let me tell ya, you’ll impress girls with it.
CG polymer sculpting
I had this model laying around on my drive and after posting the super sclupey octopus I decided to recreate the look of the polymer in a CG enviroment, so I loaded up this geometry in Max with Final Render stage 1a nd this is what came out. The shader needs some more tweaking, the SSS is not quite right, I’m planning to model some more alien/monster’s heads and add them up to this post, hopefully I can find a good balance between quality and speed with the shader since it took about 3 hours to render this image, well I cranked up some settings just for the heck of it, my fault.
The base geometry of this model was done in 3ds Studio Max, exported as obj and furthermore detailed inside Zbrush, I didn’t push too much into detailing it cause at that time my machine could not handle the scene, I didn’t use any displacement map, so the whole head was over 2 millions polygons, importing it back in Max with only 512 MB of ram was already a big task, working with Zbrush and its amazing capacity to manage high poly geometries with ease makes you forget 3D Max has some limitation!
Safe
I’n not quite satisfied with the concept of this image at the moment, it was mostly a quick and dirty render, anyhow I think it fits the illustrationfriday’s topic of the week…I think. I might revise this render, probably adding more contrast between the old mechanical lock and an extreme high tech fingerprint recognition interface.
On a website I saw a doorlock system using fingerprints as keys to secure you house, the all thing was quite expensive, from the pictures I saw the interface was extremely simple, reduced to the scan area where you press you thumb and the system recognize your unique fingerprint and let you in, it was so simple and minimalistic that a thought came to my mind, what if a “happy-go-round” fellow decide to have a little fan and smash the cover screen of the scanner…mmm, I hope they included some alternative method to unlock your door, otherwise your house wil not be only secure from intruders, but fro its own owner. I wouldn’t be surprise if they didn’t think about it, I see pretty stupid things everyday that I always think “why they didn’t think about it”.