Client Brief - CGFX Aberdeen

It's the last brief of the 3D animation college course and it involves an outside coming in and delivering a brief base on what required in the industry. Given that CGFX is predominantly and oil and gas visualisation company, it was no surprise that when we were given the options of modeling and (realistically) rendering either a helicopter, an ROV or a vessel. We were put into teams of four and so we all came to the collective decision to model the helicopter because we thought it would be easiest to split the modelling job four ways; I was in chrage of doing the helicopter body which I think is coming along quite nicely. There are lots of small details which would be impractical to model or even place on top of the surface as seperate objects, so I think I'm going to experiment with Mudbox a little and use a comination of its curve objects and its ability to paint bump maps in 3D and see what I get.

Playing With Normal Maps

It's been a while since I've posted anything, but I've been quite busy recently getting application forms filled in and sent of with regards to the Master's course I'll be doing after Summer.  But anyway, before Easter I saw that a few of my class mates were creating some pretty cool looking rifles for computer games in Max and so, inspired by this, I thought I'd give it a go myself and hopefully improve my understanding of baking out normal maps in Max.  I found some really nice AK-47 image planes at http://the-blueprints.com/ and while modelling an AK-47 is certainly nothing new, I've always quite like the look of them since using them in Counter-Strike  1.6 (that's right!  No Source for me!).  So I started by modelling the high poly object before doing a little normal test render on the magazine clip and, considering this was my first attempt and I wasn't following a tutorial series or anything, I was pretty happy with what I ended up with.

Graded Unit Character Complete

Over the past few days I've been UVing in Max, almost exclusively using UVWUnwrap's Pelt map feature which I find the most intuitive and I think it gives the best results before applying Tools > Relax to get good usable uniform UV's.  I hand painted the skin texture in Photoshop using CS5's new Mixer Brush Tool and the new Wet Media Brushes to give it a painterly look, as for the clothes I used a flannel pattern for the shirt and I created my own tileable pinstripe texture and then used the Define Pattern feature to be able to apply it as a pattern and scale it appropriately.  After I had completed the textures in Photoshop, I exported my model into Mudbox and imported the textures so that I could removes any seams using Mudbox's screen space painting tools.  I'm fairly happy with the overall look of the character and I feel as though I have to mention that I'm not looking to become a texture artist, however of course this doesn't mean that I don't spend time trying to make the textures look as good as I can.  Below are two images, one shows my UV's and the other is a collection of othographic images and a perspective image of my character.

Graded Unit Character Rigging

I've been working quite a lot over the past few days trying to get my character completely modelled, rigged, skinned and final textured.  So far I've done the modelling and rigging and I've almost completed the skinning - I used CAT to create a quick and dirty rig, but now that I have some experience in using it I was able to avoid the problems that I had with it when I used it on my last project, for instance I like to create three bones for the legs rather than two; a thigh bone, a calf bone and a bone which sits near the knee cap which helps keep the volume of the leg when deforming.  However when you create three legs bones in CAT and rotate the Pelvis backward and knee buckles, this doesn't happen when you use two bones for the legs, so I've decided to use two and the Skin Morph modifier for any clean up work.  Also CAT deals with IK chains in a very, very strange way; rather than putting the IK goal at the pivot of the last bone (like Max's Bones would), it places it at the pivot point of the next bone in the hierarchy (or where the next bone would be) as such you get something that looks like a foot roll.  Because of this my character's arms were animated using FK which is a much slower process I found compared to IK.  Below is an image of my work so far.

Left to Right: CAT rig, base mesh, base mesh with accessories

Graded Unity Character Modelling Base Mesh Complete

I Finally got a design for a head that I thought looked ok and after that I did the rest of the body in a short period of time.  The character comes in at 3,916 polygons which I'm quite happy with, especially since I've added two extra edge loops round the joints to help with deformations when animating, however because I won't be subdividing it further there are areas such as on the hands which I could optmize later on.  I'm really looking forward to getting this character fleshed out a bit more and textured, I'm going to try to use Max Skin Wrap modifier to drive my characters clothes using the underlying base mesh, it could have disasterous consequences and I might end up having to weight it to the skeleton, but I'm always trying to do something new for each project and this is one of the things I'd like to try.

Graded Unity Character Modelling

I began modelling my character a few days ago, I'm trying to do it all inside of Max rather than fleshing something out, taking it to Mudbux for sculpting then back into Max for retopology becuase I thought it would be quicker, however I have no experience of box modelling faces, so it's turning out to be quite a challenge.  Also, my design has slightly changed; I had initially planned on making my characters' foremarms and calves very rounded (like Popeye) to be more cartoony, however I couldn't get them looking the way that I wanted so his design is much more normal now.

Rendering Character Animation Brief

A lot of what I did during my Character Animation brief was building to this point - rendering.  I deliberately have a simple, low resolution scene with basic lighting and textures to reduce render time, the character is quite well detailed, however, with 2 x 2k for his body and clothes and some nice trickery to fake some effects such as subsurface scattering (SSS).  I'm using Max's relatively new and fast Output shader: 'HDR motion blur' which blurs your renders using a Velocity render pass (pretty much) but also has some nice feature to tweak the effect.  Currently the render time is at around 4:45 per frame in a scene with around 220,000 polygons. So given that I have 18 seconds of animation at 30 frames per second, it should take me around 42 hours and 45 minutes to render...  Looks like I'll be leaving my computer on overnight.  Below is the first frame of the animation: