Quick update to my werewolf head, tried some basic hair and fur at lunchtime in 3DSMax, added a hot and cold light, then added smoke and colour corrected in Photoshop. The students seemed to enjoy working on their versions at yesterday’s class, I’m looking forward to seeing what they produce over the next two sessions.
Here’s another quick Mudbox update, a work in progress sculpt I’ve been working on for my students. With just 3 classes left they will be given the base mesh and an ambient occlusion map generated from the high res sculpt and asked to approximate a target render. The youtube clip is grabbed from the realtime viewport in 3DSMax 2012.
I mentioned in the last post that I have started to teach an evening class in the Irish School of Animation at BCFE. The last few classes had been kinda theory heavy, image bit depths for displacement maps and the differences between map types and whatnot so I really wanted to get the students back to hands-on sculpting this week, which is the most important part – finding a workflow technique that suits the artist’s own artistic style. I provided a base mesh, reference and textures plus some tips so that the students could hit the ground running in the limited time we have each week. In preparation I created 2 sculpts based on the same base mesh and textured them differently. Admittedly the black boot below took me about 4 hours as I had to create the base mesh and gather reference and didn’t “finish” it fully but the brown boot was created in less than 3. I have boosted the specular highlights in these real-time viewport renders grabbed straight from 3DSmax, the hardware shaders are composed of diffuse, specular and bump maps only, all 4k and painted in Mudbox.
Best viewed fullscreen at 720p
To quote many’s the casual blogger, “I haven’t posted in a while” – this has been due to a distinct lack of free time these past months. I’ve started teaching evening classes at the Irish School of Animation, “An Introduction to Mudbox” to be specific, which requires more preparation time than I had expected, there were no entry requirements this year so it takes careful thought to design a course that is suitably paced for beginners and those with some experience. I also attended the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco this year, mainly for the summits and tutorials, including the tech art bootcamp and roundtables from which I took away a lot and met some very interesting peers and people.
For me personally, I was especially glad to meet Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry of thechineseroom, and Robert Briscoe their art collaborator on the full release of earlier Source mod “Dear Esther“, a haunting, moving game experience that I highly recommend. Dear Esther deservedly picked up the IGF award for Excellence in Visual Arts. It’s probably not for hardcore Call of Duty fans (it dismisses many of the FPS conventions we are used to e.g. shooting and jumping, in favour of a slower paced, intellectual experience) but if you’ve ever wondered what else games can be then you can pick up this worthwhile experiment for €8 on Steam.
Happy New Year – first post of 2012! Another lunchtime challenge, this time to see if I could make some decent looking rocky crags in an hour using only basic geometry and procedural textures in 3DSMax. Organic rocks can be very difficult to get right, scale and detail can often be difficult to eyeball and procedural textures must be carefully nested to remove the obvious patterns of cellular noise. I started by extruding a wavy spline, cloning/offsetting the resulting mesh and then attaching them as editable polys, using the bridge feature to patch up the hole and connecting edges where appropriate to help regularise the topology for displacement.
I then instanced the mesh a few times, allowing it to overlap and not being too careful about placement. I rotated an instance and used it as a ground plane, again intersecting the vertical base meshes.
At this point I composed the image and locked off the camera. For lighting, I added a Mental Ray daylight system and turned on Final Gather using 2 bounces at draft settings. After playing with the sun position I ended up with this:
I used 3DSMax’s displacement modifier rather than Mental Ray’s excellent shader displacement for speed purposes – I needed to be able to see the results in the viewport rather than endlessly rendering and tweaking. I wanted the segmented bumpiness of a cellular procedural map but I knew this would look unnatural so I broke it up in a composite map by multiplying a smoke procedural map over it and playing with the size. This was applied using planar mapping.
This roughened up the base mesh pretty nicely:
Adding a turbosmooth below the displacement modifier to get some extra detail (one of the benefits of using procedural textures) gave me this:
Lastly as time was running out I needed a quick way of adding some variety to the diffuse colour, which I thought should be a canyon red. I tried some fresnel effects on the dry rock but none gave the effect I wanted, so I opted for an arch & design material with a Mental Ray landscape map for the diffuse. This allowed me to choose a reddish colour for the slopes and a lighter brownish-yellow for flatter areas, which should look dusty or sandy where sediment would collect. I then added a procedural smoke bump map for fine detail not captured by the displacement, leaving me with this:
The image was a bit washed out so I took it into Photoshop for some colour correction and enhanced the sky with a hint of cloud and an aeroplane contrail. I faked a little depth of field in the left bottom corner and added some noise. Here is the final image.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,400 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
I have been crazy busy this past while so today at lunchtime I decided to use the hour creatively rather than play Battlefield. I had been thinking about a quick way to model a cave, something that may be transferable to a real-time scene at some point in the future. Natural rock is very easy to get wrong so I wanted to avoid the common pitfalls, I didn’t want to randomly layer up displacements and procedural bump maps (unusable for real-time) so I thought about some methods that might work and this is the first proof of concept. I used a Tessendorf style ocean modifier on a plane that I then collapsed bent into a cylindrical shape and modified with FFDs in 3dsmax. This came together pretty quick but I hit some strangeness in Max trying to add in fake caustics with a projector light which took up more time than it should. I rendered a zdepth pass that I used for depth of field and subtle fog in Photoshop and Magic Bullet Photolooks for grading. Here is a screengrab of the geometry in Max and the final image.
Things have been really busy in work and at home lately so as a result my blog posts have been less frequent, I’m hoping to step it up again before Christmas. Last month, a family member asked me to produce an image of a hand rendered yellow and red rose intertwined suitable for printing on stickers. With little other detail in the brief I needed something that was quick to tweak from a colour, viewpoint and composition standpoint but also would be close to finished looking at each presentation, so I decided to model it in 3D. I found a model on the web that I could tweak to my needs and below is the final, outline and wireframe results
. I used Photoshop to composite a number of passes (including ambient occlusion, outline and a greyscale Fresnel) to achieve the non-photorealistic render.
This is a very quick post to say welcome to Black Market Games, a new game development company setup by some friends and former colleagues. their first game “Dead Hungry Diner” is almost done, so get behind them and wish them all the best!
A little scary look development done a few months back. the geometry was being used in some camera mapping tests, projecting concept art onto geometry. Any textures are simple Photoshop overlays, the geometry itself is untextured. (3dsmax and Photoshop)
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