Artwork from Cortina Digital

Some really inspiring stuff from the artist's over at Cortina Digital, the small 3D character development company. seeing at they've worked on many of the big titles, It wasn't hard to find amazing work from each of their projects, but personally the 'Thief' Work was just outstanding, It was also nice to see his wireframe comparison!

These close up shots of face make me think the standards i'd like to hit with my modelling and feel with my work, 

I have to create an Ultimate image soon for another module, so will definitely be thinking about incorporating a few face renders aswell into it!

I like to think as every project I do as a stepping stone, realistically The Lonely Road is a standard very early on in my work in the 3D art world, I feel I still have a sharp learning curve and it makes me excited to move onto the next project to improve!!

A different take on showreels!

I see alot of showreels that can have brilliant models but can be quite slow or not as exciting as it could be, I understand this is great if the modellers work needs just to be seen it t-pose, but when I see such exciting short reels like this I wonder why people don't spice up there work a little more! Even though its from 2011 its still very current and I love it from the sound syncing to the small little tweaks like the characters eyes glancing at the camera!



Tomas Kral on Vimeo.

His showreel defintely makes me think about making mine that little bit more exciting that just plain t-pose showreel turnarounds!!

Cleanly transferring UV's

I needed to transfer some Uv's, but my rigger has already began rigging, often this would mean that the model cant be touched again in that way, but through a great tutorial it shows you how to transfer UV's to a bound model, the technique in itself is fairly simple, but the reasoning behind it is a little more complicated. As I wanted to keep the rig file as clean as I had recieved it, I wanted no history on these transfer UV's. through a little hierachy work, and going to the core of where the model searches for its UV's, you then change that to a workable model, letting you access where the original UV information is stored, you then transfer the attributes, delete the history, then change it back into an untouchable node that you geometry uses to know what it's UV's are. 

you can check out a much better description and the reason why its important to cleanly transfer from this great tutorial : https://vimeo.com/21577038

Animation pass 3

A very low resolution batch render just to get a feel of how the motion blur was effecting the animation aswell as seeing the colour's and feel of the character moving. This low quality render was helpful to pick out some key problems I need to sort. 

- Motion Blur with camera change causes strange frame flicker.

- foreground geometry in visor reflection looks peculiar.

Even though the quality is very low, I could see alot of fireflies that wern't just AA problems, By pushing up the glossy rays It helped with the noise of the metallic reflections, and saved having to push the the AA's of the whole scene which I wanted to avoid as much as I could.

Animation pass 2

with a massive change to animation and swapping around the shots, the flow of the animation seemed much better, before the character seemed to walk walk then stop, which didnt make too much sense, but in this updated version, we see the walk, stop shot and then continue to walk towards the city, Such an easy thing as a shot swap gave much more of a healthy flow, there has also been polishing of animation with some work on the emotion of the character. I'm incredibly excited with the level of animation in such short turnaround times, I can definitely start to feel the project piece together.

Animation pass 1

This is the first pass my animator passed to me, I was very happy with the initial animation, This project has been a good WIP and I wanted there to be alot of leverage, I had changed alot on my character on the fly, as it was rather an exploration of techniques and making a strong model for a complex rig rather than a direct study. This allowed the animator to play with ideas on the fly, If she thought something would look better changed, we worked out how to do that. Im very excited to see the next passes of change and polishing of animation.

Getting closer to render quality

I used a basic IBL just to check and sort out and problems with the lighting, I wanted to get the settings as efficient as possible due to render times already being pretty heavy with 30/40 minute renders on my laptop (Not the fastest laptop though!) With the possibility of using a Render farm, I had to both make sure it was efficient with low AA's, this was so that If I do decide to use the render farm I can ramp the AA up one or two just to clean the render that little more.

Once i was happy with how lighting, I used the new file to see how it looked on the character, the coldness on the face was exactly what I wanted, and the colour of the suit with the rocks also matched quite nicely, I didnt want to make the scene to light heavy and have ridiculous render times, as I know I can add alot of drama In after effects.

I was also testing a little motion blur!!

Matte painting exstension

After dropping my matte into maya, and playing with 3D projection, I found that I needed a little more painting to curl around my scene with the pan of the character. I've decided to drop the 3D projection, and keep it as a matte just distant in the background, The main purpose of this was to have fun with exploring a project with my rigger/animator, her to strengthen her rigging and me to develop my modelling skills, with the time getting tight, these extra bits like the projection have had to be dropped, it is a real shame, but I am still happy with the they it looks with the animation.

The reason its quite a basic cloud cover of the bridge is because there is geometry sitting in front of the middle part of the matte painting, so I didnt need to worry about the middle section to much.

Render with Backdrop

Heres a smaller quick render with my matte dropped in behind, I edited the colour of the matte to darken and give similar tones the render, I'm quite happy with this, as I mentioned I want to get into a nice position to set myself up for easier post process editing to colour match and create atmosphere.

Matte painting development

Using my IBL, I found roughly where the horizon sat in the composition, I then worked different images to form the scene which I was happy with, I render out a frame of the scene to put over the painting just to get a feel if the lighting and atmosphere was feeling the same, I think the most challenging part im facing is making sure I feel comfortable with the similar tones in the renders and matte painting and getting myself in a good position to work with these as separate entity's in post.

Ive been working with the painting in Maya, and the renders are coming out good, I'm confident that I'l be able to create an eery atmosphere with effects when I have my final renders.

Base lighting my Scene

Here I have both my first lit render, with no dramatic tone but just generally lit with not many harsh shadows & my second render which has much more of a blue, cold tone, I wanted to take that cinematic blue into post process, then work on top of that rather that have a normal lit render then work it too much in post. These are just basic render, just to get a rough feel of how the light was hitting the objects.

Modelling the foreground scenery

From a very basic shape of filling the composition In my animators early animation, I shaped a plane and took it into Zbrush, I then worked rock shapes and grit into the plane using alphas and brushes. 

The images below are different textures I was trying out on the model, to see what would fit nicely with the character and matte painting ideas. 

The second image is in scene and render with the same lighting i'l be using to base light my model!

the tones are quite blue, but matches nicely with the character, with abit of colour correction in after effects after I render out the project, I will have a nice initial render to tweak. 

Rig reel of the Character!

Rig reel from my rigger Mariya Kozhuharova. Absolute brilliant job, a very complex rig which I was kept updated with regularly, and from working closely throwing back and forth ideas got results that we were both very happy with, we went through alot of the potential problems very early on in the project, and I can say it was an incredibly smooth process where we didn't come across many problems at all. There are some great details in the rig, the complexity of the face, aswell as the separate mechanic parts that follow deforming mesh very accurately without bending itself is a very nice touch. I passed back and forth initial textures to give her an Idea of where to rig and weight the model, The initial model was very nice, then when I had more upto date realistic textures I passed them over and she was able to make tweaks to the remaining parts. 

The model had;

IK/FK arms, Reverse - foot rig, arm twist systems, Hybrid facial rig including blend shapes on curves, offset joints and controllable joints, fleshy eyes, signature hand poses, dynamically parented helmet and armor with offset controls, volume preserving buttock system. 

as I said, I was very happy!!

Check out her full reel at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsJnfLnVpeQ

Texturing the mechanics

Once again another screengrab turnaround, a final turnaround will be given soon!!

I worked alot into giving deep texture on the metal, I used a variety of metal textures and spent time manually painting mud splashes and mud/scratch detail ontop of the initial texture, I think my favorite parts of the texturing is the mud splashes up the back of the shoes and , and the grit collected in certain crevices especially the front chest piece. 

I had to make sure there was grit and mud settled in parts which would occur over time, as the scenery is quite despaired, rocky and gritty. I'm happy with the look and had to make sure I did'nt overwork it, so went back and forth from my body model to this to make sure they were at similar levels of wear.

...and the body!

Once again I began with an initial texture, and unworn/undamaged army styled texture with the different metals, I then reworked the original textures and began adding damage and dust/dirt/mud over the body, I added mudded through masking to certain parts where it would collect most, and hand brushed alot mud over the body, My favourite part is the mud splashes up the backs of the legs, i used various brushes to get those splashes that form from when trekking through mess and unwashed clothes.

another realtime screengrab!

Absolutely love this work, Hats off to Justin Holt

Definitely an Inspiration, especially with seeing Chappie recently looking back on Neill Blomkamps work and seeing the skill of the artists that have worked on his films all across the pipeline, Heres some work from Justin Holt who's show reel shows a range of work featuring his texturing, Give it a watch!

TEXTURE SHOWREEL | 2013 by Justin Holt

Texturing the helmet

I began by colour id'ing my model, then taking it into DDO to give myself a nicely texture based, I then went back and forth from Photoshop and manually painting some details in, I used some quite reflective materials on certain parts to add nice glare in certain places, i'm using these video's to get a feel of the helmet moving, this isn't final render, and was only a real time screen grab.

GetBent' Script!

The GetBent Script by Shon Mitchel was really fun to play with, by building one blade, I was able to mirror and give myself a great starting point for where each blade could slide into the latter very cleanly, It gives you great flexibility over repeating geometry along different axis and much more!

for more about the script, check out his blog at

http://shonmitchell.blogspot.co.uk/

Helmet Development

Had alot of fun creating this helmet, Starting with an inital blob around my characters head to give me the rough size it needed to be, I worked into it cutting it up into manage sizes and using my reference to flatten certain parts to start to get the rough look, I then went through each piece and sculpted it, remeshed it and projected the orginal detail so I had a nicely remesh sculpt with a very similar amount of detail. I went back and forth from Zbrush to maya, becasue sometimes it was just quicker to hop into maya to scuplt some of the smaller parts.

Front render XGEN test

I decided to give a grey/white specular to his facial hair, This is really noticible on the chin and you can see a nice effect breaking up the jawline sillhouette with the XGEN, I really wish I had a little more time to play with the XGEN, but due to time constraints I've decided to work with it more in one of my next projects, I decided not to use the XGEN on the eyebrows, I quite liked the look of them as they were, and I knew it would take a little more work to get realistic eyebrows using XGEN which is time i cannot spare atm. Im defintely feeling I may keep this as a base model if I quickly want to have a play with XGEN in the future.

Tweaking the initial XGEN

A few quick renders just checking how the XGEN was responding to the lighting, 

The Arnold hair shader is very responsive to the lighting, and actually reflected abit to much blue, so I toned down the spectacularity initially, but there was a real flatness created with this method, so after a little tweak I got to a stage with I felt still gave the glossiness of the hair, but didnt distract the eyelashes.

REALTIME RISE Oculus Demo!!

This realtime oculus rift work is so inspiring, I originally checked out the link because of how cool the cyborg model looked, but after seeing this tech demo I couldn't believe the potential that the rift is opening up with gaming and virtual reality experiences, It's definitely making me think more about exploring the rift and its integration into pipelines, with its release meant to be later this year im excited to see if they retain the standard in alot of these tech demo's, and when they will be released onto the market!

 

Amazing realistic models

Saw this model on CGSociety and checked out the artists portfolio on ArtStation (a new and really cool way of viewing artists portfolio work!!

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/courir_cgworld

Some absoloutely amazing artwork from Teruyuki and Yuka, The work orginallyu caught my eye becasue of the cyborg influence, with my current project 'The Lonely Road' im been checking out alot of Sci-fi influences and you can feel that resonate through their portfolio, some brilliant life like models, go check it out!! Here a few more stills!

Lighted with XGEN

This is a soft blue light scene of my face, I tweak the lighting to try and bring out the blemishes in my characters face, I really like the cold, surface skin broken feel that the texture and lighting create, there is also a little XGEN on the beard and eyelashes and head, XGEN is really fun and intuitive, but I can see that it may be tricky when referencing and keeping responsive, Its still a little buggy, and often has 'write-locks' and permission problems when saving out files which caused a few problems, but I'm still planning on using and referencing it into my final collab piece and my character turnarounds! 

Setting up shaders in Maya

My first time trying to setup eye and SSS shaders, I can say I am happy as I can be with the time that I've given myself, I definitely see this as a stepping zone to being better on my next model. I struggled with the eye setup a little more than the SS shader, I found the SSS shader setup is fairly self explanatory, and through playing with various amounts I found a SSS that I was happy with. The eye shader I found a little more tricky, there were a few techniques on the internet that I read, but I couldnt find much on getting a strong setup using Arnold, Ive learnt more than I knew, and I know my eyes will be better next time roumd

Generating sculpt detail

 I really liked this technique, using my Albedo layer, and choosing to mask crevices of the image gives you a highly detailed mask over your model that can capture alot of pour and blemish detail that will obviously line up with the albedo perfectly, This plus my underlayer of Pours and skin differences gave a nice worn face.

With bloating the unmasked parts very slightly, you can get pour and hair detail, I found any extra detail now was free detail, and I could soften out anything that didnt quite work.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Electro Skin FX Shot Build

Check out this breakdown of the work done to create the amazing look achieved on Electros skin, A lovely insight to how layered effects and tweaks can build up an very cool effect, Electro was definitely my favourite looking character, some great effects along with one of my favourite scenes in the movie when his bolts were hitting the electric pylons and they were making a tune along with the soundtrack, very cool sound sync!

Extra face detail

Aswell as using projection to get my albedo layer, I wanted to work my own pours In just so I has some control on the level of pour detail. I knew that when using SSS in Arnold it was going to soften out my detail a little, this allowed me to prepare in advance and work the detail a little harder than normal, just to make sure when I come to generating the maps they would hopefully need little tweaking when setting up my character in Maya.

I used the mask a little when focusing on the lips, It helped alot to be able to freely stroke to give lip detail and not be worried about going over, The opposite was also effective, by inverting the mask I could focus on the pours and the mouth and not have them spill onto the lips.

Romain CHAULIAC - DEMOREEL 2013 // CG Generalist - Modeler

One of the big reels out there!! CHAULIAC's work is really great, I first saw his work reposted by CGBros, I Like to check up every now and again and see what work he is posting, which was currently a nice breakdown of a Hig res still he create with lots going on, Cyborg influenced of course (following the theme of many of the sci-fi reels I enjoy)



Here is his 2013 Reel, still some great work, go check out more!!

Unwrapping the head

After finishing the texture of the main characters face in Zbrush, I took it over to Maya to Unwrap, I used the new Unwrap tools that have come with Maya 2015 to give me a healthy initial unwrap, from there I began to smooth out and shift the points until I got a unwrap that I felt would be good for the 4K map projections. I then took the model back Into zbrush, and copied the new Uv's over to my Model inside of Zbrush to see how the detail responded to the UV's. I was very happy with the result, and decided to continue working a little extra detail into the model with the newly UV'd model knowing all the detail would be kept. 

Head development

The main character for my small collaboration project the lonely road is in full production at the moment, i'm currently finishing up texturing, I broke down the model into separate parts for skinning purposes and have enjoyed working on the model in four separate parts, The body, The hard surface mechanics, The helmet and the head. This is close to my final texture for the head. We tested the texture on the rig and after a few tweaks we are getting very nice results, definitely made us both that little more excited to see it coming together!

The Unknown Turnaround

The 2D turnaround for reference when I come to modelling my character in 3D, Worked a real large grown into the side of his body, and worked lots of colours of rot and infection into the flowery flesh, I took alot of influence from 'The Last of Us' I'm also liking the idea of using 'Marvelous Designer' to create the worn clothes, and add extra distress in Zbrush!

I like the concept, but plan on using this as basic reference when coming to my 3D model, I like working into the character alot when it comes to 3D, so may change it slightly, the growth does feel a little heavy, but i'l see how it looks when I come to it in Zbrush!

Texture Development - The Unknown

I began working colour into my developed shapes, and started to get interesting fungus/poison type colours mixed into the flesh and blood of an infected human, I then look at how distressed I wanted the character aswell as changing the colours of the clothing.

Sillhouettes - The Unknown

Some quick silhouette shapes of various monster's I sketched up, playing with limbs, growths and adaptions. I like sketching out sillhouettes as they sometimes give me a cool base to work from, and can begin working colour and texture into the shape aswell as still changing the shape very quickly and easily

Gathering Inspiration for a Personal project!

Gathering alot of influence from lots of different sites and Artists here, I think my biggest resource was ArtStation, absolutely brilliant site, A new clean cut way of showing off your work, an online portfolio which is gathering more and more publicity, Check it out!! 

I began of looking at a variety of influence to see which route of monster/alien i'd like to design, after a large collection of material I started getting drawn towards models and concepts that were more human like, but distorted, so a good underlying anatomy of human shape, but infected or an alien. What I like about this project is that its a slight spin off of 'The Lonely Road' Project, I wanted to think of a personal project that I could give a little more depth to the vague Lonely road story!

A 'Making of' overview of The Lonely Road's Pre-proudction

The Lonely Road from Josh Rogers 

Video Inspiration

Here is scene from 'Falling Skies'. This was one of my initial inspirations to create a project like this.

A Short that could show of my design through a dramatic and intense scenario.