Tutorial Details
- Program: Adobe Photoshop CS5
- Difficulty: Advanced
- Estimated Completion Time: 14 Hours
Tutorial Assets
The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.
Step 1 - Prepare the stock image
First off we will remove the background from our reference image, and modify the shape a bit to make the model a bit more streamlined and athletic. Open up the image below so we can get started.
Double click on the layer thumbnail to unlock it, rename it or just hit OK.
Now the background removal will be quite easy in this one yet we have to be careful and follow the steps to have a good defined extraction. We will start with the magic wand tool with a tolerance of about 10, and make a selection of the white back.
Once we have a rough selection, don't worry about the hair, we will deal with that later and it wont be used in the final image. Now let's use the refine edge feature in CS5, while the selection is live just click on the refine edge button on the top bar shown below.
This will allow you to brush over the edge of the selection to refine it, just click on the smart radius option box and brush over the edge of the selection, you will see it tries to find a better border for it.
This settings will work great for the body but you can see here it will miss a bit off the hair, yet don't worry about it like I said we will not use the hair.
Once you have covered the edge, adjust the smooth and feather settings as shown to 1 and 0.2 respectively and click OK.
Now just invert the selection and copy paste the girl to a new layer, and hide the base layer.
As you can see the result even if some of the hair was missed, works perfectly for the rest.
Now make a new layer below it and fill it with bright blue.
We will use this blue layer to detect how good our edges are, so we can see they are smooth enough, yet there is some white cast still there.
So to fix this up, we will use the defringe option in the layer menu, then type a 2 with in the pop up and click OK.
And there we have it, our edge its perfect now.
Step 2 - Blocking in the base sketch
OK going on; this is a very easy step yet it requires a good amount of brushing time and checking upon reference. I am sure you guys have seen the Crysis2 nanosuit http://www.photoshopdata.com/images/tuts/nano/images, if not you can search some online and have them available as reference. Here in the tut we cant use those http://www.photoshopdata.com/images/tuts/nano/images as copyright even for explaining might be an issue. So let's talk a bit about what we are doing on this step, if you look at those http://www.photoshopdata.com/images/tuts/nano/images of the nano suit, you see they have 2 main materials; a dark gray overall cover and key sections of metal that give structure to the suit. Those metal sections its what we will sketch here, nothing detailed just work out the shape and position of the pieces in the female body. OK first off let's change the blue background to a dark gray for now.
Now this girl even if she looks good, we will adjust her body shape a bit to make it a bit more athletic. For this we will use another cool CS5 feature the puppet Warp, so go ahead and access it in the edit menu.
Now immediately you get the shape of the girl in some kind of a grid; now the way it works is that you can click on this grid and make anchor points that can be used to move the image shape around. So we will make the anchor points shown below to make our changes.
Once we have the points in place we will slightly move them to reshape the girl body a bit as shown here.
And you can see the subtle result here, just a bit slimmer waist, longer legs and a bit of repositioned breasts.
OK now we have our reference ready so let's make a new layer.
Now to sketch all these shapes we will keep it simple and use only this gray here and the brush shown below.
Now let's define the rough shape and position of these metal sections.
Now you will probably need to use the eraser at some point so use a sharp brush such as this below.
Now at this point I am just looking at the reference http://www.photoshopdata.com/images/tuts/nano/images and sketching the parts just working out the position of the sections according to the shape and pose of the girls body, leaving small gaps between sections just to know where each shape starts/ends.
Now the legs and hands present a challenge as they are in quite different position from each other and from the reference, so just working out the shapes present a challenge, yet it also leaves opportunity for creativity.
Placing the shapes in the head/helmet section its much easier since its mainly straightforward. I just placed a line on top of the head for reference to see where would the helmet top be. We will erase this line later.
Now at the end of the step, this is more or less how I came up with these shapes position, we will refine and reshape most of it, and maybe you will choose to create it a bit different, don't worry its quite OK there is nothing that you have to follow exactly; or maybe you choose to go more accurate with the reference, that is also quite OK. This being mostly a painting step, it is a very good idea to study the HD video for this step and study the process.
Step 3 - Blocking in the base suit
We will now do the same for the rest of the suit, as you can see in the reference of any image you are using the rest of the suit its divided in section strips of anatomically adapted semi hard material. Well this is our objective for this step, let's begin by creating a new layer and make a quick selection of the base girl by hovering over the layer thumb and clicking by holding the command key (ctrl key on windows).
This gives us a nice quick selection, so now let's choose a dark gray color, almost black.
And fill the selection in the new layer with this color; then reduce the layer opacity a bit so we can still see the girl as reference.
Now let's select our brush tool again, with the same hard edge brush we used for the metal shapes; and select a slightly lighter gray than that of the previous fill.
Then simply start painting the rough shapes of those stripes of material that build up the suit as shown here, leaving a small gap between the sections.
As you can see we are just following the contours of the girl below to build up an structure of stripes leaving gaps as reference of the different sections, you don't have to worry about the border with the metal sections since we are on a separate layer below those.
We continue painting on the legs the same stripes that as you can see kind of follow the muscle groups of a human form, yet at the same time, start and end at the different sections of the metal parts.
We continue or shapes all the way to the feet, again looking at the girl and trying to position our shapes according to her pose and body position; by now we have detached ourselves from following too much of any reference since we are creating something based on it yet new. We now have the full sketch of our suit and we will only peek at the reference to get an idea of the look and details. Now its the time to zoom back and see if we have any shapes in incorrect position or any errors in those shapes.
OK so once we are satisfied with the overall sketch, its time to remove the part of the girls head/hair that we will not use at all. For this let's create a layer mask for the base girl so we can mask off what we don't need, yet for our base suite sketch we will only erase what we don't need.
Let's start with the girl, just mask off with black all the hair section as shown here.
And for the black layer just erase around until you have the helmet shape.
Now for the next part we will use this soft brush but we will modify its settings a bit as shown below enabling pen pressure for the transfer option in the brush palette. This gives us full control with the pen over the softness of the brush.
Now let's bring back our black layer to full opacity and merge it with the stripes layer.
Pick a dark gray again, almost black color.
OK before painting be sure to lock the pixels on this layer. And here is what we will start doing, we will work on softening up and defining the divisions between each stripe of material, as the next step in detail for our suit; if you paint to much or want to change any shape a bit, just select the lighter gray of the stripes and paint in again. What I do here is have the dark gray and light gray as the front and background colors, and just switch between them using X on the keyboard.
Let's now continue with the other side of the neck as shown below, as you can see this work both integrate the strips together and also starts giving it a bit of volume.
Remember to switch between colors if you have to correct any shape or mistake, and continue with all sections of the suit as shown below.
We will do the same for the face mask and helmet, as you can see here there is no detail in what we are doing, we are just working out the shapes and unions of the stripes both in between them and with the rest of the suit.
We will also do the same at the top of the helmet, and if you need to erase a bit of the edge of the shape or modify it in any way be sure to unlock the pixels in the layer so you can do it.
Step 4 - Defining and re-defining the metal shapes
OK its time to refine the sketch a bit, so we will start with all the metal shapes, by zooming up close you can see that the previous work its quite rough, so its just a matter of taking these shapes and straightening up the lines. We will do this step in two parts, we will define these shapes as I said and then go back on all of them and paint even more defined detail. OK so let's get started first of we will need a small defined brush such as the one below.
We will sample the light gray from the existing metal shapes.
So let's start with this sections here, as you can see we are quite zoomed in and we can see the pixels so let's try to straighten up the shapes and make them as smooth as possible.
OK this is the objective for now just smoothing out the shapes try and remove any jagged edges and rough strokes.
Let's do the same on the mask, on these two screens you can clearly see the objective and how we have refined the whole mask section.
At this point I noticed there are these kind of clips on the chest area that needed to be added, so just paint them in as shown below.
OK now we can continue with our work; in these section besides refining I notices some of these sections by the ribs where to long so I just shortened those a bit and refined the whole structure as shown.
Continuing the work on the middle section just refining one step further all those shapes.
Now I also noticed the section below was from a different material, some kind of dark glossy metal, so just changed my color to black and painted over it.
Then I switch back to the lighter gray we have been using and a softer brush.
Now just brush in a bit of highlight on this shape, nothing detailed just to keep in mind the different material for later on.
Let's move forward and keep on refining the metal structures. As we can see here what we have are very rough strokes.
And our objective its to soften and refine one step further.
Here is the before and after http://www.photoshopdata.com/images/tuts/nano/images for the hand section just turning those rough shapes into something more defined.
And the same work on the knee structure closing in the gaps and defining what will be the final shape even further
The same goes for the feet section, although for this part I noticed we where missing the soles, so I quickly changed to the other layer to roughly paint those in.
OK once you have all the shapes refined we can move on to section 2 of this part, now we will go all over our metal shapes and increase the detail one step further. You might wonder why not do it all over in the first pass; so let me explain, this workflow allows for you to make changes gradually and forces you to familiarize yourself with the progress of the shapes and to catch on time any proportion issues, faulty shapes and other mistakes. OK moving on let's now change our brush for this one here, its softer, yet we will be zooming in much closer so the result will be smooth yet not soft.
You can see we are just increasing the detail of the shapes even further by smoothing and detailing what we have so far.
Now in big sections there is another technique we will be using to smooth out the edges, since it will prove quite difficult to straighten up those long curves.
OK we will do this with the help of the pen tool by changing the setting in the top tool bar shown here you get lines instead of closed shapes that we can quickly use to make selections.
So using the pen tool we define a smooth curved line at what we want the edge of the section to be and close it outside the shape as shown here.
Now with the pen tool still active just right click on the trace, and choose make selection. Then in the pop up type a radius of 1 for the feather and click OK. Be sure Anti-aliased and New Selection are both enabled.
Now we will erase within the selection so we get the smooth edge we want for this central part of the metal structure.
You can see the result here a very smooth soft edge that its ready for the next step. You can use this technique all over if you are comfortable with it, I know some artists that use this 90% of the time to come up with hard surface shapes.
OK let's continue with the chest section refining and closing in the gap between the pieces as shown below.
And we continue with the same process all over the shapes taking what we have, closing the gaps and refining it one step further, painting or using the pen tool technique if needed or wanted. You can clearly see the work done here in this before and after screens for the hand section
OK after covering all the shapes we zoom back and see that overall our shapes look much much better and certainly not a sketch anymore. As in all of my painting steps and tutorials, be sure to study the video so you can get a feel of all the work that was done.
