« Posts by Terry

Zbrush Concept

November 25, 2011 / posted in General, News, Uncategorized, Zbrush / 3 Comments

D&D style attribute rolling for character modeling… WTF? Yes that’s right, our latest assignment involved rolling character attributes to create out next sculpt. After our attributes were fleshed out we had to do a portrait of the character. I lucked out with the following stats.

Gender: Female
Age: 41-60
Job: Explorer
Time Period: Prehistoric
Disposition: Corrupt

Well here is the sketch I came up with after a few hours. I did some loose painting in Photshop after scanning my initial sketch in. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting the upated sculpts of the character. The whole sculpt and paint is due on the 12th of December.
Concept for female corrupt elderly prehistoric explorer (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Terry_Explorer_V2 NULL.jpg)

Crow Sculpt Final

November 11, 2011 / posted in Zbrush / No Comments

Hey everyone, just posting some final shots of my crow sculpt after several long evenings. The major change you’ll notice from the previous update is the feather treatment. On the old sculpt I used the snake hook tool to pull geometry out for the feathers. In the end I wasn’t happy with how this technique looked. For the final I created a few custom feather alphas. I would stamp a row of the feathers and then mask them off and pull out the next row, continuing this process until the entire chest was covered. For an initial foray into Zbrush I am happy with the results here, but I think that I need to learn more about the layers options and morph targets. The undo system seems somewhat tricky to work with and there were several occasions when it didn’t work at all. I also learned that my system can’t handle merging 3 different 13 million poly meshes. I’d chuck more RAM in, but I’m already at my boards 8GB max. I hope you all have a nice remembrance day.

Final crow - perspective (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_persp2 NULL.jpg)Final crow- close up (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_close NULL.jpg)Final crow - centered (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_center NULL.jpg)Final crow - side view (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_persp NULL.jpg)

Zbrush – Crow Man

November 2, 2011 / posted in Zbrush / No Comments

Say hello to “Crow Man”, my first Zbrush sculpt. On Monday we started learning Zbrush in class and it’s been a lot of fun. When I start learning a new program I usually have this insane drive to do everything the “proper” way. Zbrush has so many tools and features it’s actually a little scary. Instead of learning every little detail of the work flow I’ve decided just do use the basic features and work my way through this sculpt. I’m finding this is letting me get more work done and is interrupting my creative flow a lot less. Sure I might not be doing everything the most efficient way, but I think it’s a better way to get your feet wet.

I’d like to say that this piece has a lot of inspiration from one place or another, but to keep with my “loose” method I’ve just been sculpting in whatever pops into my brain. That’s not to say that I’m without reference though. After deciding to do a crow I compiled several images of crows and black birds. I’ve also got a few of my human anatomy references up for the skull and torso. I’ve really tried to push the geometry of the skull to extremes so that the character really has a distinct face. Birds are also related to reptiles so I’ve tried to work in a few lizard like features of offer some artistic variety. You can see this in the bony mounds around the eyes.

The reference has proved most useful to me for the fine details. It’s easy to imagine the large forms and features in your head, but as you increase the detail it becomes a lot harder to just imagine a lot of those finer elements. I’ve got a lot of snes and early console RPG references floating around in my head and those games never had this finer detail because it wasn’t technically possible. The hardest part of this sculpt for me is knowing what each brush does. There are so many and each can be manipulated to a near infinite degree.

For the majority of the sculpt I have been using 4 brushes: standard, pinch, inflate and move. At lower detail levels the move brush has been great for pulling gross forms around and altering the profile of the character. The standard brush has been used for building up the surface in places, and the pinch and inflate are awesome for popping detail out of the surface. All in all this has been pretty fun and I still have yet to paint and texture it. We will be learning how to do that this week in class. I’ll post the painted version when it’s done. If things go well I’ll take it into Maya and use mental ray to pop out a nice render :)

Perspective view of sculpt (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/perspective NULL.jpg)Detail view of sculpt (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/detail NULL.jpg)Side view of sculpt (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/side NULL.jpg)Center view of sculpt (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/center NULL.jpg)

Breakfast Still Life – Final

October 11, 2011 / posted in Maya, Mental Ray / No Comments

I finished the still life from my last post and then went ahead and did some post work in Fusion. All the major elements in the scene were rendered out on separate render layers in Maya. At first render layers seemed like a lot of work, but after setting them up the benefits are awesome. As always if you have any questions about the work flow feel free to leave a comment or email me. For those hoping to see pastries in the foreground… I’m sorry. I didn’t have enough time to give those croissants the care they needed. GG pastries in Mental Ray. GG.Below are my rough draft and raw render along with the final image. Next time I do a light setup I’m going to try and use the light fog in Maya instead of relying on Fusion. This is the first time I’ve ever used film grain in post and I think it may be a little heavy handed, but in my defense shooting in that low light would give you some strong grain.

Glass Render from Mental Ray (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/PrePostStillGlass NULL.jpg)

Glass render untouched from Mental Ray

Early Test Render (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/glassesRough NULL.jpg)

Rough Render for 3D Still

Final Post Edited Render (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/TerryMatthe_GlassFinal NULL.jpg)

Breakfast Still Life – Rough

October 4, 2011 / posted in General, Maya, Mental Ray, News / 2 Comments

This image was created for my rendering class in college. We were given the objects and asked to properly light and render them. The style of render was left up to us. The challenge with this assignment is to get the glass looking right. Most of the objects needed to be unwrapped so that’s the first thing I did. Unlike my last apartment render (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/general/news/apartment-final-render-thoughts/) this piece can contain no global illumination or final gather. Any bounced light is simulated with secondary light sources. I had to remodel the glasses as their were lots of strange triangles buggering up the reflections. The pitcher and the glasses have separate faces for the inside and outside of the object. Under the glass mesh render properties the objects are set to one sided.

One thing to keep in mind while rendering glass in Maya and Mental Ray is black surfaces. If you are rendering a translucent or semi translucent object and you are getting black artifacts or faces on your render then you need to increase your reflection rays in the object’s material properties. Reflections and refractions take a long time to render due to the amount of ray casting going on. Too many rays and you can drastically increase your render time. Too few and you’ll get black faces where the rays didn’t penetrate the objec. Reflections are a little tougher as you actually have to know what should be reflected. If you can’t see them at all it’s a littler tougher to guess which ones are missing. If you’re casting enough rays within each material and you’re still getting black faces then chances are you have not set your ray tracing limits high enough in the scene’s render settings. In case you didn’t know there is a master ray trace control found under the “Quality” tab in the render settings window.

The colours of the piece are still pretty loose. I was playing around with Adobe Kuler (http://kuler NULL.adobe NULL.com/) and though it was a pretty fun tool to choose a colour pallet. My biggest problem at this point is the strength of the lighting in relation to the floor reflections. I’d like to keep the light warmer (3500k), but I’d also like to get some less harsh reflections in the floor. Most of what’s left to do involved tweaking materials and finalizing a colour pallet. I might take a swing at Maya fur again, but we’ll see if time allows it. I’ve been working part time in while going to school and it’s really been cutting into the amount of time I have to get homework (let alone personal projects) done. I would cut my hours down, but at my work the minimum for part time is 20. I did find a wonderful way to save time though… I set my computer up so I can login remotely. This makes it a lot easier to setup and look at renders. I suppose I could just batch render multiple files with a script, but I wouldn’t be able to change anything after I leave home. I don’t know about you guys, but I frequently get hit by ideas while out and about and this lets me incorporate those changes into the renders.

Rough Render for 3D Still Life involving glass (http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/glassesRough NULL.jpg)

Fruit Bowl Render

September 18, 2011 / posted in Maya, Mental Ray, Textures / No Comments

In our lighting and rendering class we are going through the basics of mental ray lighting with linear work flow. I’ve done a bit of this on my own as you might know if you keep up with this blog. I’m learning a lot about the different tools you have in Mental Ray to control shadows and blurry reflections. Our first assignment is to light and render a fruit bowl that as supplied to us. I’ve just started this assignment and I only have the orange texture started, but I have finished lighting the scene. We aren’t allowed to use any indirect lighting systems like Final Gather or Global Illumination. Any bounced light has to be simulated. I’m going to add coloured point lights to simulate bounced light after I have my textures setup.

Most of these lights are casting ray traced shadows with a light radius of 5, 40 shadow rays, and 2 bounces per ray. There is a bit of light linking going on so I can illuminate the bowl and drop cloth separately. For this coming Monday we have to have at least one of the fruits textures started. I have chosen to start with the orange. I generally like the texture, but I have to make a new bump map that puts all those little circular bumps across the surface. The current bump isn’t dense or varied enough.

(http://www NULL.delightning NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/lightrough1 NULL.jpg)
As always, if you have any questions about the settings or any of the file setup just post em here or email me.

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