This work is fully modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D. I have used BodyPaint and Photoshop for the textures. I start modeling the snail shell, to do this I use a spiral spline and a circular shape inside a sweep NURBS, I activate it and adjust the spiral parameters to get both the necessary turns and the thickness at the beginning and at the end.
Once the turns of the spiral are defined, I edit the model and distort the “mouth” or hollow the shell to make it bigger. Afterwards, when it is on the modeled body of the snail I will distort it quite a lot to remove stiffness and adapt it to the shapes of the snail. I also take advantage to do the first texture tests on the shell, especially to check whether the brown lines on the spiral are coming along nicely.
To model the snail body I start with a cube which I subdivide several times and stretch to make it an elongated rectangle which I put into a HyperNURBS. I distort it slowly with polygons and dot tools to define the basic shapes of the body, I also reduce or extended in size some polygons according to the bigger or smaller thickness needed in the model.
To make the model bend I make a choice of several polygons at one end of the model which is going to be the head and I turn them and move them vertically, I keep going on distorting polygons and dots, I turn, reduce them, etc, until I got the final shape of the snail.
The antennae and horns are created by means of extrude inner and several extrusions to provide the necessary length in each case as well as to get new polygons to modify the model in that particular side. For the mouth I have cut several polygons to which I have later applied an extrude inner.
I fit the shell onto the snail body and make several distortions to be able to adjust both elements. I make the shell narrower, turn it and distort its opening to adapt it to the shape of the snail back; I retouch the back of the body to make it look as if it’s going into the shell. At this stage the basic modeling in both the body and the shell is finished.
As for the helmet, at the beginning I wasn’t sure about it. I was afraid it could make the nice face of the snail less important, but once it was placed properly all doubt disappeared. Not only did it not make the face less important, but also it added a quirky touch.
The helmet is a sphere changed by means of cuts and extrusions. On the sides of the opening some polygons were triangular, which made an effect of imperfection on the model, but this was easily solved when textured, so I didn’t worry about it. Anyway the rounded side of “padding” which outlines the opening of the helmet also helps to diminish that unwanted effect. The eyes are just spheres set in the hollows of the antennae.
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The engine is a free model downloaded from the internet to which I added many details and corrected some imperfections. Afterwards I put it into a HyperNURBS so that the edges would round and so get a wearing away effect in all the pieces of the engine.
The metal sheet on which the engine is lying is a choice of polygons from the shell which I separated from it and gave volume by distorting it and adding dents to it etc, to stress the wearing away effect caused by use and pass of time.Both the shime on the opening of the shell and on the body and floor are made by means of sweepa NURBS distorted with different thicknesses. The sticky stuff is EPS’s imported from Freehand.
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Texturing
This is the part I enjoyed the most, I really like experimenting with textures and also, as you are fitting them is when the work really comes into life. Personally I think a poor modeling can be improved a lot by means of texturing.
To make the texture of the snail I had to be very patient. The first step was the UV mapping in BodyPaint of the body, then using a real photograph of a snail as a starting point I cloned parts in different layers which I modified afterwards, changing size, orientation, etc.
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The displacement map achieved from the texture and later applied to it highlights the specular even more and adds lots of shades to the snail skin..
Although I wasn’t looking for a very realistic texture I did want it to be believable in the context of the illustration which still is a caricature even though it has a sense of reality (especially because of the photograph of the road).
 
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To achieve a believable effect in the texture of the shell of the snail I start with a photograph of a melon which I clone a few times in Photoshop to get a good base, then I mix it with another photograph, a piece of tree bark and finally I add vertical lines painted on another layer with an airbrush, I adjust the transparency of the layers in overlapping mode. I also make the same texture in black and white for the slight displacement I applied to the shell.
I make a new black texture with “rust” shader in the material palette of Cinema 4D, I give it a high valve of specular and I mix it with the texture of the shell to create a greasy atmosphere and spots just under the engine.
The texture of the engine is a very reflecting material with different valves of colored ambient occlusion applied in almost all the channels, bump, color, reflection, specular, etc, mixed with other black textures in a channel alpha to which I added noise and a lot of specular to get a greasy rusty and muddy effect for the lower part of the engine.
The eyes are a circular color gradient with a high specular and reflection.
 
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For the helmet I used a paper (film) which I torn, scratched, stamped on it, wrinkled, got it dirty and then scanned it and made it into black and white with high contrast, I inverted it and applied it to a red texture in the channel alpha, I added a little noise and a high value of ambient occlusion. The number and the lighting are another overlapped texture.
 
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Lighting
I normally use quite a lot of light sources; I place them so I can highlight details of the scene. In this image I have used 13 lights: 4 omni lights as ambient lighting, 2 to highlight the form of the engine, 3 spotlights to highlight the back of the engine, 3 highlight to stress the specular and the greasy effect on the shell, a spotlight behind the snail neck for the sub surface scattering, in addition to the sun with area shade and the sky with a HDRI with an atmosphere similar to the photograph of the road for the global lighting I have used a surface with an asphalt texture for the floor and the yellow lines only to be reflected on the engine and to add some radiosity to the snail body and shine.
Post-Production
A very important part of this piece was the postproduction, which I carried out in Photoshop. For the background of this image, I made the final render activating the render multipass in a lot of channels so to have them separately in layers afterwards. This is useful to be able to work on each channel independently in Photoshop so that I have more control for the integration of the render on the photograph. So I had the specular, the layer for each light and another layer for the ambient occlusion. This way you get a very wide control on each channel and you are able to adjust the image as precisely as possible.
