This is my 3D blog where I take up anything from my work that involves 3D or the process around 3D, meaning post and pre-production, texturing, animation, special effects etc.
Hope you enjoy it.
I've been working a bit recently more and more on my Eto.101 project. I am texturing out this entire scene. This will be the point of measurement of how the rest of the environment will look like. Now there's still a lot more to do, but I wanted to show the current progress. This is the Mihgo residence where the protagonist lived pretty much his entire life in.
So, I think I'm finished, there's really nothing else I wanna do with it, more than of course adding more zombies, limbs, heads and stuff, but I unfortunately don't have time for that. This will be the entry I'll be submitting for the contest. Now let's hope I win. ^_^
This is what I have so far. Don't know what else to do. I am going back and fourth if he should be grayish like now or actually having skin color. Both look good and have their own distinct look. However, I'm leaning more towards gray is it's more 'spooky' that way. -_^
Ok, so the arms are finished and now only the feet are left. I'm not going to sculpt the legs as he will have pants on him. Maybe I just make something real quick like bumps and a bit damage in cause the pants will be torn, which I think I'll do.
EDIT: I may be finished with the sculpt, I dunno. I'll take a break and see if there's something more that needs to be done.
This is how far I've come with the zombie sculpt so far. Just keeping on chugging on. I plan on more damages areas, just haven't figured out how to do them yet.
By this point I think the entire set is completely textured, that is of course unless I find something that's wrong, get suggestions or I just add stuff and change my mind about something. This is the last update for today though. Now I'm gonna eat chips and watch some entertainment!
I think I'm pretty much finished with the textures for the shed. I'm using 4 different tree textures which I took to Photoshop and color corrected so they have similar color, with the exception of the bigger support pieces. Next will be finishing up the entire scene with textures then on to creating a zombie character.
The UV unwrapping is a bit tedious, not at all difficult thanks to UVLayout (thank god for that application) but not so much fun. Anyway, just posting a update on the process and potential wood texture. I will of course have more than just this one but just to give an example.
EDIT: Ok, the unwrapping is complete for the shed (finally, that was ... not fun. -_^). Now to the actual texturing of the boards. Instead of creating a new post I'll just update this one with a new image.
Over at 3D Buzz there's a unofficial contest just for fun which I entered just to practice my skills with a deadline. I kinda need to see how I perform under pressure, so I thought this would be a nice challenge. It started the 17th November and the due date is 7th December, I joined today. So I did lose 6 days but there's still a lot of time left, about 2 weeks.
This is what I've made today. I think I might finish all the modeling today, what's missing are some debris on the ground. Other than that there's a character I will work on, a zombie and maybe some severed heads and such.
Ok, I think this is a wrap unless someone suggestions something or if something is off. I don't know what else to do on this piece with my current knowledge and I don't wanna spend a whole lot time on it. Just wanted to try out the fur as I wanted to do that for a long time, and now I have.
PS. I think I know what causes the 'non soft' look on the fur. It's not Mental Ray but it's the Physical sun. When I added a few normal lights and tweaked the sun settings I did get a softer look. But in the end it turned out I did like the more hardened look. ^_^ However, I did add two other lights to get a bit softer touch to it, not much, it's rather felt than seen.
I've added a few things to the teddy bear, like eyes, a bow tie and a cord on top of his head. I think 95% of the tweaking and modeling is done (I will make it a bit non-symmetrical). I currently am mainly concerned to make it look cuddly and soft, currently it doesn't look like that. I noticed that if I use Mental Ray it gets this 'hard' look while if I render with Maya Software it gets more of that soft look (look at the previews post). If I don't find a way with Mental Ray I will need to combine them as I want Mental Ray for the eyes (dielectric material), the cord and the bow tie.
But anyways I need to do more tweaking.
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PS. I finished the Halloween contest image a few days ago. Forgot to upload it here. Nothing special, I'm just glad it's over.
That's right, the title says it all. Once upon a time I did a model wanting to create a teddy bear, well I never finished it. So I re-did the everything and added fur. This is the WIP stage so far. I wanna see how far I can get this to look decent. I learned way way back when I did the other model that UV layout played a vital part of how the fur would be laid out. This time unwrapped the thing almost according to the real life teddy bear I have here with me, I just changed it a little bit as ease of unwrapping, not much but enough to make me happy.
I figured I'd throw in this image as well. Just a closeup on the bee itself. It's not the best image but I'm far from being able to do very good looking renders. I tweaked this image in Photoshop after render. Not much to say, but I'm glad this is over so I can finish other projects. While I have cleared some projects up I will be studying lighting and rendering methods cause I badly need that.
I was playing and studying the dielectric material and caustics within Maya. Added some particles and a few fields. However, I totally forgot to map the displacement for the bubbles so they are static, when I realized I had forgotten it I was already too far in the rendering process. Basically what it would have done is the bubbles would change the shape a bit when going upwards.
Also, I didn't render from start to finish in one go. I stopped and rendered the next day, and too late I realized the bubbles actually changes places a bit. The rendering took several days for 400 frames, too long for me to redo and fix that. But it's something I'll keep in mind for the next time.
I basically forgot to bake out the particle animation which is why they changed places. A blunder I know. >.<
I'm gonna end it here. I need to study up on lighting and shading a lot more in order to make this image look good. Currently I am just playing with lights not really knowing what I'm doing but hoping the result is good. Such method is not good to go by, it eats a lot of your time. Thus, I'm gonna look for tutorials and other enlightment in this area so that I can evolve.
I will later post an image of the actual bee after I've redone some stuff. Just because I'm planning to send it to www.3dmodelsheets.com, but only if it's good quality of course which it currently isn't.
I've made a rather simple scene to place the bee in. The bee is not finished yet but this is the general mockup. I'm playing around and trying to create a nice light setup, but for a novice like me it's hard. This is a quick post-image that I took to Photoshop (and clearly visible PS effects), this is not the final version, plus the final version will be higher resolution.
Basically I'm struggling with getting a nice environment so that both the bee and the background looks pleasing.
Ok folks, this is the second time I blog about something that isn't created by me. But as with these things I feel they have to be seen by other people. This is a hilarious short about the Pixar's lamp intro. There's nothing that can be said so you just have to watch it. Be sure to be seated before watching, or you might hurt yourself laughing otherwise.
This is made by these folks: Writer: Dan Gurewitch, Sam Reich Music & Sound Design: Carl Sondrol Animation: Gloo Studios
I guess I continued to work on this model, I'm gonna post my updates for today. Gonna continue tomorrow or something, I'm going away for the rest of today.
Cheers.
EDIT: I added the two AO and wire images, as a request by a dude over at CGTalk.com. Because I did those I figured I could add it here as well. Just didn't wanna create another post for that.
Today I was browsing the CG Society forums like any other day, then I found a thread where someone posted a link to a new site called www.3dmodelsheets.com. It's sheets (image planes) of various insects, animals and plants. Well, that's what I think it will be, as it's rather new there isn't too many things there yet.
However, I took a look at those sheets and when I saw the bee I just couldn't help myself, I modeled it out. It's still a WIP I think, I want to create real bee textures and such, and possibly work on it in ZBrush. I slapped on a temp texture just so that it looks a bit more pleasant than plain gray stuff (or AO/Clay render). Well that's all I had to say today, I'll probably continue working on it.
I just wanted to put this up here just because. This clip here is a early pre-viz for the project codenamed Eto.101. It shows scene 4 at sequence 1. There's not much to actually see here but if actually care to understand a bit then you could check the storyboards I have posted here (it's part 3) this clip is about.
Anyway, there's really not much else to tell. I'm on another project right now so I don't have much time for eto.101 but as soon as I'm finished with that I plan to more seriously work on that.
To start things off, I've renamed this player model from Ivan to Nexus. The reasoning is that this model is supposed to replace the old one (which was the intention from the very beginning). Now, there are some stuff that has happened, oh where to start, where to start?
I've continued with the animations and have created several new ones and even posted links to videos for people to see. However, it may turn out that I will have to redo everything again (I'm not sure I wanna go there). The thing is, Nexuiz is using a format called .zym for player models, but the devs wants to get rid of this format and introduce another .dpm. They are essentially the same and the workflow is very similar, however, dpm-format can have several influences (4) while zym only can have 1. What this means is that zym can only have rather rigid animations, each vertex has to have it's own bone to 100%. The dpm format allows for smoother transformations for it's animations, resulting in a nicer look. Because I've animated with 1 influence I would need to re-paint the weights for the skeleton, and the animations will probably change some.
I've I'm lucky and find a good way to paint and distribute or copy those weights to other meshes I won't have to reanimate everything but just tweak the current animations so they fit better. If I'm however unsuccessful I either will have to redo all of them or just let everything be 1 influence for this particular model, then in the future use 4 influences.
Only time will tell what will happen. I will probably step back a bit from this and while I re-evaluate the situation and the procedures I may work on something else in the meantime.
Ok, so I finally finished this piece. Not much different from the last image, didn't have much time to work on it and I just wanted to finish it anyway to jump on to other things. Re-touched in Photoshop as well.
Hmm.. stuff happened, and then more stuff happened, before I knew it, I was creating a entire environment just to be able to display the sword. Ok, here's the deal, I wanted to create a simple background for the sword to be in, however, this simple background turned to become an even greater task than creating the sword. I have now for a few days been building and texturing it. Honestly, I don't know where I'll stop.
The sword however I believe is all but done, might make a few tweaks to the texture/bump map. It will all depend on the lighting I will settle for (which I haven't decided yet). I'm thinking of adding a few more objects into the scene before moving on to lighting. Anyway, I'll post two images, one of the handle of the sword (without bump) then a overview of the shot I'm going for.
Cheers.
PS. All is done in Maya, I used Photoshop to adjust the levels of the image above as it was too greyish and washed out. The plant and tree are paint effects I converted to polygons if anyone wonders.
Yes, I'm creating a sword just for fun. I have only one reference image which I'm creating from, I'm gonna post the reference image after the model is complete. Now, the whole modeling is done, (the materials are just temp, I just threw something on) and I'm gonna go to unwrapping it followed by texturing based of that reference image.
As the title says, I am now releasing my first texture pack. There's not that many textures, 51 files with normal maps included, so around 30 textures (not all textures have normal maps). The license is GPL so it's all free, use them however you see fit.
I give just a few examples of what textures are inside. The other textures I have released earlier are also included so not all are super new. Also, they might not be the best supreme quality textures but at least it's something, and it's free, so enjoy!
Here's two more textures, I am providing normal maps as well but keep in mind that I have transparency (alpha) on the SewerLid texture and that certain applications might not support normal map alpha. If that's the case gimme a note and I can export them to .bmp or some other format if you need it.
