Feb 2015 3D stuff

Here's 3D Saltire as done as he's going to be. He's at a point now where I could keep tweaking and fixing things forever. 

In the end, it's not really turned out as well as I'd have liked and I had planned to do some better renders and build some environment around him but I am itching to do something else. 

I have learned a lot through doing this though. Especially x-gen hair. Once I got to grips with how it was working it was quite easy to get some decent but basic looking hair rendered. 

I will definitely be using it again and trying to include more of the x-gen features now that I have an understanding of the basics.

Likewise with Augustus. I'm happy with the results and I could do more but I would rather just do better next time.

Some of the new bits I've made for Lapin in with the old. I sort of want to just keep going and make a wee village heh

The game definitely needed a bit more on the light and environment side of things. I'll keep plugging away at it and see what difference it makes.

Jan 2015

I've still been doing freelance games work I can't post unfortunately/fortunately. It's been a nice mix of low poly modelling and something a bit different. It looks like it's going to continue for the next few months as well which is great. Hopefully I can post some of the work up soon.

I discovered Manga studio over the Christmas holidays - what an amazing program for doing comics.

I'd had a script from a friends (Chris McKenna) short story for a while that I'd wanted to draw as a comic. I edited it into a comic script over the hols and started working on it early in the new year. Here are the first pages done completely in Manga studio 5.

I will be working on this when I can over the next few months as I'd love to get it printed. It's a great wee all complete story in 20 odd pages.

I got started on a bit more Lapin work this week. It's been sitting on the shelf since October last year but with different things happening it seems a good time to crack on with it again.

In my free time I've still be messing about with 3D hair. These are some really hideous renders of my first go with xgen, ignore the beard with default settings... (I've finally admitted defeat and given up on Maya hair- it's truly awful) in Maya 2015. 

I'll find a bit of time soon to add some extra flair to it and see what I think. If I can get it looking decent for Saltire and all his hairy goodness Augustus should be a piece of cake with his wee tuft of hair on top.

I also got back to the life drawing now that I have a bit more of a routine again (til the next deadline crunch lol). Just a couple. The first ones I did were mega ropey. Theres were a bit better.

Freelance Work

I've been doing some freelance work for the last month or so thatll continue through into the new year, all of which I can't show any of! So moving on with Augustus and Saltire is going to be difficult. 

I got both characters all set up for rendering and did some comp tests. 

Augustus isn't really any farther forward. Here's where Saltire is now in Maya.

And I've posed him in Mudbox, though I still need to clean up some of the sculpting and painting on him.

Also got back to the life drawing class one week. Was a bit ropey. Felt quite out of practice since I'd not been in about a month.

Maya Hair

3d Hair :/ 

I've been struggling to find a way to get hair that matches the look of the rest of the model. It's something I would like to learn more about in the future but for now I think I am starting to get somewhere with maya nhair/paint effects.

I think if i had a more powerful computer I could get this looking quite good. I've gone through a lot of trial and error and it seems to be the best results come from having different layers of hair curves rather than just one layer which makes it look quite flat. But for now if I add too many hairs to the clumps or too many curves the thing crashes at render.

I had to raytrace the shadows as well as for some reason depth map shadows caused a fatal error when i tried to render.

Anyhoo, I think I am going to leave it like this for the time being and get on with texturing the last bits and bobs.

Hopefully Gary will rig him for me otherwise I'll be hitting the rigging tutorials  :)

11/02/14

This week: Saltire got updated. Spent most of Sunday working out why the displacement map had giant areas that weren't being displaced. In the end I'm not sure I "fixed" it but just used a higher level of the mesh as the base. So instead of my base model having a delightful 5000 polys it now has about 80000. Shame, but won't affect my plans much. I'm pretty much ready to dive into the painting now. It's all set up in MARI and ready to go, the shaders are all set up with texture files layered properly to use the multitile UV space. 

It was a good week for sculpting! Got the creator all sculpted up and ready to paint as well. Quite pleased with the general look.

Gun textures are done. Not the greatest things in the world and I wasn't happy to leave at that in terms of quality but it's more than detailed enough for how small it is in the shots it's in. I also messed around with cutout opacity and additional colour on the mia shader. The illuminated parts actually have a light plugged into them and creating the glow at render time rather than post. Scott might well ditch this in comp but it was fun to play around with.

Matte paintings. Woo. Had fun doing this. A lot more of these to come in the near future.
  

February Already :S

Ugh rotten week. Got Monday all to myself for workshop texturing then rest of the week was spent dealing with problems. Thankfully, the problems are solved or at least have a plan for dealing with them.

Some renders of the workshop. Just panels on the back wall, roof , tools and monitor displays to do. Maybe another 5-6 hours to go. I really wanted to be done with it on Wednesday. Just noticed that chair looks a bit to clean. Need to sort that tomorrow...

I've a couple of matte paintings to do next so that'll be a change of pace then it's onto the creator. After about an hours work. Here's what I've got so far...

Very much reminding me of 60s Star Trek backgrounds :D

I've got a render sitting for shot 17.3 for a background that's entirely matte painting. Must admit that's a bit intimidating!

More Saltire 3D updates. Got displacement maps working out of zbrush but there are still some major sculpting issues to be addressed, his face is desperately on need of some more detail too. I think the base mesh might also be too low for some of the displacement. May try taking out level 2 from zbrush and working on that going forward.

I'm using UDIM and multi tile uv space for the textures in MARI. The displacement maps were set up using a layered shader in Maya for this.

Got the wee Macho background finished this weekend bar the wee photo of him with Mr Tiddles in the back left. Here's the comp. Macho himself was done by Gary in Flash while the background was done by me in Photoshop.

I also got a bunch of storyboard stuff for various projects formatted but I'll post them next week.