Making of Super Snailby Andrés Hurtado, Spain

This work is fully modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D. I have used BodyPaint and Photoshop
for the textures. I start modeling the snail shell, to do this I use a spiral spline and a circular
shape inside a sweep NURBS, I activate it and adjust the spiral parameters to get both the
necessary turns and the thickness at the beginning and at the end.
Once the turns of the spiral are defined, I edit the model and distort the “mouth” or hollow the
shell to make it bigger. Afterwards, when it is on the modeled body of the snail I will distort it
quite a lot to remove stiffness and adapt it to the shapes of the snail. I also take advantage to do
the first texture tests on the shell, especially to check whether the brown lines on the spiral are
coming along nicely.

To model the snail body I start with a cube which I subdivide several times and stretch to make it
an elongated rectangle which I put into a HyperNURBS. I distort it slowly with polygons and dot
tools to define the basic shapes of the body, I also reduce or extended in size some polygons
according to the bigger or smaller thickness needed in the model.
To make the model bend I make a choice of several polygons at one end of the model which is
going to be the head and I turn them and move them vertically, I keep going on distorting
polygons and dots, I turn, reduce them, etc, until I got the final shape of the snail.

The antennae and horns are created by means of extrude inner and several extrusions to provide
the necessary length in each case as well as to get new polygons to modify the model in that
particular side. For the mouth I have cut several polygons to which I have later applied an
extrude inner.
I fit the shell onto the snail body and make several distortions to be able to adjust both elements.
I make the shell narrower, turn it and distort its opening to adapt it to the shape of the snail back;
I retouch the back of the body to make it look as if it’s going into the shell. At this stage the basic
modeling in both the body and the shell is finished.
As for the helmet, at the beginning I wasn’t sure about it. I was afraid it could make the nice face
of the snail less important, but once it was placed properly all doubt disappeared. Not only did it
not make the face less important, but also it added a quirky touch.

The helmet is a sphere changed by means of cuts and extrusions. On the sides of the opening
some polygons were triangular, which made an effect of imperfection on the model, but this was
easily solved when textured, so I didn’t worry about it. Anyway the rounded side of “padding”
which outlines the opening of the helmet also helps to diminish that unwanted effect. The eyes
are just spheres set in the hollows of the antennae.

The engine is a free model downloaded from the internet to which I added many details and
corrected some imperfections. Afterwards I put it into a HyperNURBS so that the edges would
round and so get a wearing away effect in all the pieces of the engine.
The metal sheet on which the engine is lying is a choice of polygons from the shell which I
separated from it and gave volume by distorting it and adding dents to it etc, to stress the wearing
away effect caused by use and pass of time.Both the shime on the opening of the shell and on the
body and floor are made by means of sweepa NURBS distorted with different thicknesses. The
sticky stuff is EPS’s imported from Freehand.
Texturing

This is the part I enjoyed the most, I really like experimenting with textures and also, as you are
fitting them is when the work really comes into life. Personally I think a poor modeling can be
improved a lot by means of texturing.

To make the texture of the snail I had to be very patient. The first step was the UV mapping in
BodyPaint of the body, then using a real photograph of a snail as a starting point I cloned parts in
different layers which I modified afterwards, changing size, orientation, etc.
The specular of the snail skin is very useful to finally get the translucent skin sensation because
the one from the original photo and the strong specular applied by me in the texture overlaps,
together with a sub surface scattering and a low valve of reflection applied to the material help to
create that effect.
The displacement map achieved from the texture and later applied to it highlights the specular
even more and adds lots of shades to the snail skin..

Although I wasn’t looking for a very realistic texture I did want it to be believable in the context
of the illustration which still is a caricature even though it has a sense of reality (especially
because of the photograph of the road).
To achieve a believable effect in the texture of the shell of the snail I start with a photograph of a
melon which I clone a few times in Photoshop to get a good base, then I mix it with another
photograph, a piece of tree bark and finally I add vertical lines painted on another layer with an
airbrush, I adjust the transparency of the layers in overlapping mode. I also make the same
texture in black and white for the slight displacement I applied to the shell.

I make a new black texture with “rust” shader in the material palette of Cinema 4D, I give it a
high valve of specular and I mix it with the texture of the shell to create a greasy atmosphere and
spots just under the engine.
The texture of the engine is a very reflecting material with different valves of colored ambient
occlusion applied in almost all the channels, bump, color, reflection, specular, etc, mixed with
other black textures in a channel alpha to which I added noise and a lot of specular to get a
greasy rusty and muddy effect for the lower part of the engine.
The eyes are a circular color gradient with a high specular and reflection.
For the helmet I used a paper (film) which I torn, scratched, stamped on it, wrinkled, got it dirty
and then scanned it and made it into black and white with high contrast, I inverted it and applied
it to a red texture in the channel alpha, I added a little noise and a high value of ambient
occlusion. The number and the lighting are another overlapped texture.
Lighting

I normally use quite a lot of light sources; I place them so I can highlight details of the scene. In
this image I have used 13 lights: 4 omni lights as ambient lighting, 2 to highlight  the form of the
engine, 3 spotlights to highlight the back of the engine, 3 highlight to stress the specular and the
greasy effect on the shell, a spotlight behind the snail neck for the sub surface scattering, in
addition to the sun with area shade and the sky with a HDRI with an atmosphere similar to the
photograph of the road for the global lighting I have used a surface with an asphalt texture for the
floor and the yellow lines only to be reflected on the engine and to add some radiosity to the
snail body and shine.
Post-Production

A very important part of this piece was the postproduction, which I carried out in Photoshop. For
the background of this image, I made the final render activating the render multipass in a lot of
channels so to have them separately in layers afterwards. This is useful to be able to work on
each channel independently in Photoshop so that I have more control for the integration of the
render on the photograph. So I had the specular, the layer for each light and another layer for the
ambient occlusion. This way you get a very wide control on each channel and you are able to
adjust the image as precisely as possible.