digital photo: Skatching Technics used to Create a Shattered 3D Composition

Shattering and exploding effects have been a staple of design over the past few years. With the prominence of 3D programs, combined with an improved ease of use, designers around the world have sought to use 3D effects in their works. 3D renders naturally have a depth and various dynamics to them, and they provide an excellent base around which to design.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to setup and render a 3D figure, and then combine some simple sketching techniques to create a cool shattering effect. These techniques can be used in a variety of other ways in design, and you’ll get a glimpse into the 3D workflow and how you can use 3D objects in your designs.
Let’s get started!

Tools used:

3DS Max
Poser
Adobe Photoshop

Final Image Preview:

Step 1: Figure Creation

We will start off by opening Poser. Poser will have a template figure placed in your viewport. We need to delete that figure and place our own. To do so, with the figure selected select the drop down titled “Figure” and choose “Delete Figure”.

After you have deleted your template figure create a new one, to do this select “Figures” on the right side bar. You can choose any you want, for mine I chose the folder titled: “Poser 6” and the figure called “James”. Depending on your version of poser you may have to select a different figure, don’t worry you can use anyone you like for this.

Once you have placed your figure in your virtually done. I have moved my figures arms down as shown in the screen shot below, but this is not required.

Once you have your pose you’re done with poser, now we need to export it to 3ds so we can continue editing it. To do that we will click the “File” tab and go down to “Export” -> “3D Studio”. This will bring up a screen displaying each part of the body along with the ground and any other objects you have put into your scene.

Mine looks like the screen shown above. I have chosen a “single frame”, deselected the ground and checked yes when it asks to export object groups for different parts of the body. Now just save it and open up 3ds.

Step 2: 3DS work

In 3ds we will import our new figure almost exactly the same way we exported it. Select the tab titled “File” -> “Import” and just choose your figure. A dialog box will appear and you should select “Replace current scene”. This will drop our figure into a completely new scene so we can continue editing him or her. Once your figure is placed into the scene we can start off by deleting everything below his knees as in the below screenshot.

Now that we have placed our figure and removed some areas go ahead and press “M” on your keyboard to open the “Material Editor”. This will load a set of duplicate standard materials, so you can choose any of them you want to edit. I choose the first one and set it up as follows:

• Ambient and Diffuse where linked and increased slightly.
• Specular was set to a light grey.
• Specular level was set to 102.
• Glossiness was set to 31.
• Soften was set at 0.1.
Your material should look similar to the way mine does in the screenshot. Now you want to select your entire figure and apply the material. To do this your simply click the circle with a square icon in your material editor. But note, if you haven’t selected your figure it will remain grayed out. So be sure you have each object group highlighted when doing this.
Once you have applied your material we can go ahead and change our view. So use your rotate tool in the lower right to rotate your perspective viewport. Try and get your view port to match mine as closely as possible.

Now we need to blow our figure up some. 3DS has a “Space warp” tab right by the light tab on the right hand side; it looks similar to a wave in the ocean. Once you have clicked the “Space warp” tab choose the drop down and select “Geometric/Deformable”. This will bring up all of the deformer warps that 3DS offers, we will select bomb and place it by our figure.

I usually place about four bombs around my figure in the final scene, one for each body section, but you should play with just one bomb first.
Now that we have our bombs out we need to make them blow up the figure. To blow the figure up select the “Bind to space warp” icon, this should be up in the top left. The icon looks like a window, a wave and a red magnet.

Once you have selected this we need to click our bomb and drag to a part of the body. Since we exported the body into groups, where you drag the dashed line to will drastically change your figure.
I always start with the head and then make additional bombs for additional body parts such as the back/torso and arms. But on occasion I do use more than one bomb on a object, for instance in my scene the same bomb attached to the back also affects the head object. Just remember to play around with were you place them and how many you use

Now we need to click our bomb and choose the arc shaped tab on the right hand side entitled “Modify” this will allow us to change the settings for our bombs. I setup all of my bombs differently depending on the scene, and which body part it is, for the head I did:

The parameters that need explaining here are the “Falloff”, “Seed” and “Detonation”. The “Falloff” when enabled sets a radius for our explosion. The “Seed” parameter is a random seed for the way the fragments will travel and which sections of your objects will move. The “Detonation” Parameter is basically the timer for our bomb; it allows you to set which frame the bomb will detonate on. Experiment and add bombs or take them away until you’re satisfied. Now we will select the toolbar at the bottom that looks like a ruler and slide it forward. I kept mine on 7 as you can see in the above screenshot, but you can stop at 5 or take it to 100 if you like.

My scene now looks like the below screen shot, but yours will differ depending on your bombs.

Now that you have your exploding figure the way you like with the material you like, press F10 or chose the drop down titled “Render” and select “Render” you can see my settings in the screenshot above, I only changed the size and selected render. Your size will depend based on your system and what size canvas you will be using later in Photoshop. Once it’s finished select the save icon in the top left and save it as a .PNG or if you would rather a .TIFF. This will allow us to edit the rendered figure without the black backdrop, unlike a jpg which would have kept the backdrop.

Step 3: Post work

NOTE: Take note that the post work will be done with a tablet, if you feel you are able to use a mouse then do so. If you don’t think you can use your mouse and you are without a tablet you can use the pen tool or the shear filter but you will not be able to get the same sketchy effect.
Now on to the fun part! And in this case the quickest/easiest parts. So to start off you need to create a new document. I went with 2000*3000 but anything similar should work. Once your document is created we need to drag our figure in and then get a background. I will be using a slightly textured BG I made however you can get a nice texture off of Sxc (www.sxc.hu) or you can use pure black, the choice is yours! Once you have dropped your figure in, positioned him in the middle and added the BG your document should look similar to mine in the below screenshot.

Our next step is to duplicate the figure, do this by right clicking the layer and selecting duplicate layer. Once that is done we need to turn the fill down to 0% and leave the opacity at about 70%. Now we can add a stroke to the layer and only the stroke will be visible. So click the F on your layer platelet and choose stroke, when the dialog for your stroke appears set it up as mine is in the below screen shot.

Now just nudge your stroke layer a tad to the right (or left) so it looks like the below screenshot. Be sure that the stroked layer is under your figure! You don’t want to have any weird things atop your figure.

Once you have positioned your stroke layer we can start the brush work! So create a new layer above all your other layers and name this layer “Brush work”. Now we need to create a new brush so set your brush up as mine is in the below screenshots.

Now we can choose our colors, we will be using two colors, the pink (the same color as the stroke layer) and a light blue. So grab these two and start sketching out some lines around your figure as I have done in the below screenshot.

Just try to follow the shape of the figures body. It’s okay if it drifts out off of the figure or inside him, it’s going to look messy either way!
Continue drawing more lines around the arms/torso.

Continue doing the above process but now start adding in lines that look sketchy and that follow the path of where the explosion happened. Also, start doing small detail doodles, such as coloring around the eye sockets.

Start filling in your star polygons with color and tracing them.

Now you can start going down towards the torso and filling in the gaps where the polygons were tearing apart.

Continue doing all of the above and start shading in polygons, be sure to keep swapping back and forth between colors.

Now using the same brush draw a few ink drips coming off the polygons. Note that this is optional but it does add to the piece.

Now on a new layer continue doing the same as all of the above. However once you are done sketching and doodling apply a Gaussian blur with a 2px radius. Once the Gaussian blur has been applied we need to fade it; press CTRL SHIFT F and set the blending mode to screen. This should cause them to have a slight glow.

Now we can create a new layer under our figure, this layer can be entitled “Lines”. Using your polygon lasso tool create some hash marks and then fill them. Duplicate this layer and change the hue (CTRL U) to the opposite color (if the lines were pink, make them blue). Once you have done this merge the two layers together and duplicate them about behind the figure.

Now we can create one last layer, this one will be called “Shapes and sketches”. Using the same brush but with your color selected to white just draw some random lines coming out from behind our figure. These should be really rough lines, so don’t hold back!