This is my final project for my studies in IAC (Israeli Animation Collage). I was inspired by illustrations of Jean-Baptiste Monge and Pascal Moguerou.

First I've started with the snail shell, very fast from rail extrude along a spiral. But something, in the overall look of the shell, wasn't right. Silly me, trying to recreate the nature :-) The "thing" that I was missing, was nothing else but the Golden Ratio, Google it for more info... So now I know the problem, great! But how I'm goanna solve it? I killed 3 days on that, trying different styles and plugins for both, MAYA and Lightwave Modeler. Until I found the Goomoo Utilities that didn’t work in MAYA 2009, but did in 2008.

The shell:

The color and the displacement were done in Photoshop. May be only a bump would be enough, but I wanted a displacement, it makes me fill like I'm not cheating.

After I was satisfied with the shell, the snail itself was next. The model was very simple. The displacement was created in ZBrush using alphas that I created from real snails pictures. The alphas gave me a good starting point, but the rest of the work was hand painted. The hardest part was to find the right shader for the snail body, at the end I used the mia_material.

Next was the gnome, I’ve started first with a head. A profile of the gnome face was painted, just some basic lines to guide me thru the modeling.

Gnome face:

The head displacement was first created in, Photoshop:

The result is nice, but it wasn't enough for me. And as you can see it looks more like a bump, and it puffed up a little bit the whole face, hence the nice childish look.

The second version of displacement was done in ZBrush, and here I had more control on how the face will look at the end.

The eyes where created according to Alex's Alvarez tutorial.

The hat is a simple model with texture and bump:

The shoes:

This is the first version of the gnome with snail: