Create an OniFrax 3D Composite

Click to enlarge.

Note: This is a half tutorial – I will basically show you how I created the effect in a way I hope you will be able to reverse engineer into your own project.

Intro:
OniFrax is a style developed by one of Digital Visions very talented employees. In this tutorial I will show you how to create an image in the same style. The reason I decided to figure out how this was done (which didn't take long) was because I wanted to use one of the images but the £300 price tag put me off ever so slightly. The tutorial really is quite simple and i'm sure you can come up with something much better than my first attempt pictured above, however I have labeled it as advanced because you will be required to create, texture and render a 3D object and I am not going to tell you how to do that!

Body:
For this tutorial you will need either two or three images. One of these will be a 3D element that you have created and the others can be any interesting/ intricate image. I only used two different images for my composite – a 3D render and an x-ray picture of some flowers.

1. First things first, open your favorite 3D program and create an organic looking object with an interesting but smooth surface. Texture it with a reflection map or chrome shader then zoom in really close, find a crazy camera angle and render the image.

To do this I highly recommend the ever so cheap Amorphium Pro [Mac and PC] which is essentially an organic modeler. Other than that and for mega bucks – Silo, Modo, Form•Z. If you have non of these and obviously you won't want to buy one just for this tutorial then just do your best in Bryce and feel sorry for yourself. Proof-reading this tutorial I decided to have a go in Bryce and it is possible, just create a mountain, hit the 'E' to get in to the editor mode then just play around with the Green and Orange effects. Smooth it, adjust your camera, add a material and render away!

2. Next I want you back in photoshop. Create a new document of a size you choose.

3. Fill your background layer with any light colour, a pastel is perfect. I choose an orange but a gray, blue or anything will do. The purpose of this is so your final image has no black areas, open my PSD and turn it off to see what I mean. I have named the layer 'Anti-Black'.

3. Create a new layer and fill this with a colour slightly darker than a Mid-tone. This layer will be your highlights layer. Later on we will paint white on this layer to give certain areas a shine, but for the moment something similar to the below will do.

4. Change the layer mode of the newly created highlights layer to 'Lighten'. This will make any areas you do not lighten later slightly transparent. If you do not do this then the anti-black will not work.

5. Paste in your 3D element (on top) and change the layer mode to multiply. You can play around with the layer modes later but most of them will create an all too strong effect so remember to adjust your opacity accordingly. Your image may be looking a little dark, we will sort this out in two steps time.

6. The next thing to do is to copy in your other picture, remember I used an x-ray image of some flowers, change the blend mode to something you approve of, I settled on screen with an opacity of 13%.

  
The X-Ray flowers...   

7. Time to lighten the image... If your image is looking too dark then create a levels adjustment layer and bring the whites up.

As you can see there were no whites in my image at all, there weren't even many mid-tones so I had to drag the white light marker two-thirds of the way to mr black there. Below is my image so far.

8. Time for curves. I'm was not happy at all with the way my shadows were looking at this point so I created a curves layer to correct this. I left the highlights alone but brought the shadows up a little. See below.

9. Much better! Now lets colourize the image. I usually do this with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer but have decided to show you a different method of doing this. That's the greatest thing about Photoshop – There are 30 ways to do everything. So create a new layer on top of everything and fill it with the colour you want the rest of your image to take its Hue from. I choose dark blue. Once filled change the layer mode of this layer to 'Colour'. This transfers the hue to all the below layers but retains all the highlights and detail of the layers below. A great layer mode to use when colourizing old photos incidentally.

10. Looking okay but still dark n dingy. Lets work on the highlights again. Click on your highlights layer (it should be above your background layer). Select a pastel colour and with the brush tool (choose a brush with soft edges) paint over the area your 3D object takes up to lighten that whole area. Now change to a white colour and paint again on the areas where you want your image to coruscate. My highlights layer and image now look like this.

11. Next lets add two layers of clutter to the image. The first will be interface clutter. Create a new layer below the colourize layer and set its layer mode to luminosity. This means the layer will inherit the lightness values of the layers below it. On this layer use the brush tool and some funky brushes (mine will do wink wink) to paint on crap that will make the image look futuristic. Next create another layer on top of everything and use the brush to add text. Colour the text to your choosing although mine is just white. Alternatively you can use the text tool and make your own.

12. The finishing touches that I made were to add another levels channel to bring the blacks towards the mid tones slightly to add to the overall brightness, I also added curves and hue/saturation to the bottom two layers as you can see below. This is just me being picky about the overall effect.