Thursday, 23 April 2015

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!!

Monday, 20 April 2015

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!!

Saturday, 18 April 2015

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

Friday, 17 April 2015

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.

Thursday, 16 April 2015

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.

Wednesday, 15 April 2015

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.


Tuesday, 14 April 2015

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.


Saturday, 11 April 2015

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.


Thursday, 9 April 2015

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. 


Wednesday, 8 April 2015

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

Monday, 6 April 2015

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.

Saturday, 4 April 2015

...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!


Friday, 3 April 2015

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