The best digital art from the CG community

WAYANG DHALANG

ARTIST

Kasita Wonowidjojo

SOFTWARE

ZBrush, Maya, Mari, XGen, V-Ray, Wrap, Marvelous Designer, Nuke

Recent Gnomon School of Visual Effects graduate, Kasita Wonowidjojo, created this piece for a look development class taught by Miguel Ortega. The image, which takes its name from a Javanese term meaning shadow puppeteer, took Wonowidjojo ten weeks to complete.

“The puppets were the most interesting piece workflow wise,” she tells 3D World. “I got my hands on two of these puppets and disassembled them for reference. I wanted to approach creating these how an artisanal Wayang maker would.” The traditional process would have involved cutting a huge piece of water buffalo hide as a base, which Wonowidjojo replicated by modelling the puppet’s silhouette in Maya and adding wear in ZBrush. They would then hammer holes into the hide, which could be achieved by using Live Boolean in ZBrush. “For the texturing process, artists would paint a gold base before adding the other paints on top of that,” says Wonowidjojo. “I created various paint shaders in Maya using procedural noise nodes. I applied masks painted in Mari for a V-Ray Blend Material. Building materials procedurally like this gave me much flexibility during look development.”