From a sculpting point of view the Mon Cheri adverts were technically very simple as the only item to require sculpting was the twig although with the marvel that is hindsight it didn’t need it and the leaves would probably of benefited more. We had thought there would be dappled light playing on the twig and cherries and that sculpting would be of benefit.

Steve had brought back some branches and twigs from the photoshoot in Italy (he got all the perks!) but they weren’t right. They were too thick and were so perfect as to lack any character and could almost of been off any old tree. In a local park I managed to find some cherry trees and borrowed some leaves and a twig to use as textures (fully intending to give them back, naturally).

Peeling the bark off a twig without damaging it was surprisingly difficult but a pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon in the garden! I soaked the bark and covered the inside with hand cream to keep it soft till Monday. I don’t think Steve discovered the origins of the hand cream on the scanner!  So after some photoshop magic to clean up the scan and arrange the features where I wanted them I had a half decent diffuse map.

After building and UVing a low res twig I loaded it into Zbrush and used the diffuse map to suggest the sculpting. We’d decided against using a displacement map as it was causing rendering speed issues without much visual benefit. If we’d of been using Renderman then we’d definitely of gone the displacement route but Lightwave wasn’t quite so robust. So then it was an easy job to export a higher res mesh and normal map from Zbrush.