Tomahawk

M16

2011-04-30T02:29:00.000-07:00

Another updates. This time round is the weapon the soldier is holding. I believe the details are not accurate but have tried putting together various part of the references found online. The texture and lookdev process had been harder than I thought. Different materials, such as one with broader spec and others with tighter spec were assigned to different parts of M16, to achieve a much interesting look to it. Again, displacement map is used to achieve finer details, especially sculpting away the perfect edge on certain parts.

Next step would be to start posing the characters. That means to have basic rigging system, paint weights and more paint weights. Then I could based on the new pose to sculpt other area such as arms and legs. Looking forward to it :)

Boots

2011-04-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

So... moving onto boots. Taken much longer time than I thought, especially in getting the fabric to look right. For some strange reasons, the displacement map is looking wrong onto the show lace models, as in the negative value seemed to look reverse on rendering. By reversing the normal, the problems were solved. However, this should not be the solution. Will have to investigate further. Currently the right boot textures are the exact replicate of left boot, looking alright at the moment but might need to add a little variants when putting altogether.

Knee Pads

2011-04-18T05:30:00.000-07:00

Another updates on Knee Pad. Nothing too fancy here :)

Hands and Gloves

2011-04-16T07:26:00.001-07:00

Continue onto hands and gloves. Lots of details were added using displacement maps, especially on the gloves. However, not all displacement details were created inside ZBrush. Sometimes it may be easier to simply do it inside Photoshop.

The arm and fingers are the harder area. Especially in getting the right skin tone. Have been tweaking it for a while but I guess it might be better to put everything into a shot to see what requires further tweaking....

Continue on Body Vest Lookdev

2011-04-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

Moving onto the guarding pads and a little bit of shirt. The initial thoughts would be a straight forward sculpting in ZBrush and textures in Photoshop, and let the shaders do the rest of the job. Well, there is an unforeseen problem here. The original mesh for the stomach pad, groin pad and shirt were all too low poly. I subdivided the mesh 7 times inside ZBrush to have a detail sculpt. However, the dispplacement maps generated just seemed to rendered out wrongly inside Maya Renderman. This is something new and I am glad to find that out as resculpting these items weren't taking too much time. So, by smoothing one time in Maya and export it out into ZBrush for sculpting seemed to have solved the problems.

Rendering the body

2011-04-05T07:55:00.000-07:00

Back again with new updates. Continuing with the formula of the fabric shader, it wasn't too hard to get the look needed. However, the challenge this time is the velco straps. It has many spiky like nylon/plastic materials on the strap. So, my initial thought would be to grow fur onto the straps, with thickness set to a larger value for both tip and base. Tried it and the result turned out to be ok, its ok but not great. Also, I would have to be extra careful to the geometry when there is an extra fur system to your character. So I turned to displacement again and I made rows of white dots and filling them onto the strap. I have attached a close up on the displacement texture here to better explain what I did. The result is great! So far... On the still it looks good, and I know there won't be any close up shot onto the velco strap. Also, until a turntable is rendered, I won't know how much flickering there would be from these fine displacement. I am also not entirely satisfied with the folding on the shoulders, more fabric folding details onto the shoulder and chest area would be needed.

Moving onto face

2011-04-01T05:27:00.000-07:00

Human face is always a very challenging topic. Even though I had done it quite a few times... still I am far from getting that winning formula. MentalRay has misss_fast_skin material which gave me more controls such as Epidermal, Subdermal and Back scatter color. Thus making it a little easier to achieve better human skin. The Renderman for Maya on the other hand, has less control and is a little trickier to get it right. The first time I started using Renderman for human character is Eddy project. You can find my tutorials at CGArena:

http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/maya/eddy/eddy.html

Managed to achieve some success. However, the white man has different skin properties than black man, so its another (almost) complete start over again. I started off by projecting facial photo textures onto the 3D model, using Mari instead of Bodypaint 3D, mainly because Mari will project the actual texture resolution onto the model instead of Bodypaint 3D that depends very much on the screen resolution. Bodypaint 3D could do the same thing but with extra steps thus making the process much slower. However, Bodypaint 3D is great when you have the based texture ready as it can read PSD format. Allowing you to edit the textures back and forth between Photoshop. When shading the skin, with the usual skin SSS setup, I had once again using facing ratio to add a little green tint to the surfaces facing away. If you look closely to the face edges you will see a slight tint of green, making it a little more interesting.

This will be my first pass for the head model. It is still far from being real but I guess there is no reason to tweak any further till the full body is done and put it next to an actual footage. Usually, you will then realize what other details and color tweaks may be needed to achieve realism.

Moving onto the body next...........

Continuing the fabric renders

2011-04-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

Taking the fabric shading formula and applied that to other area, such as the straps. Instead of adding rough fabric pattern in ZBrush or displacement map, I used Bump map to achive such finer details. The shade/sun glasses turn out to be a little harder than I thought, especially on getting the dust to look natural. A splatter texture is used to achieve the final effects. Again, facing ratio technique is plugged into the Reflection intensity to reduce the amount of reflection on the facing away surfaces. PhongE material is used to capture sharper hightlight. The metals materials has a relatively easier setup, color and spec maps. One little trick I did in ZBrush is sculpting away the perfect bevel edges, giving it a subtle irregular shape, thus making the specular on the edges to look more natural and interesting.

Rendering test

2011-03-31T08:06:00.000-07:00

The modelling and UV process took two weeks to complete. Since I will be using Renderman for this project, which is extremely fast on displacement rendering, lots of details can be achieve through displacement map. Such as the rivets on the metal on the helmet, if you compare this image to the wireframe image in previous post. All sculpting were done using ZBrush, exporting the map out in 16bit TIFF format.

Getting the fabric to look right would be my next important step as this Marine character would be mostly covered by similar fabric. The renders shown below is basically using a simple lambert material with a Ramp and Sampler Info node for getting the facing ratio value and mapped it with a brighter version of the normal helmet fabric color map. This is to achieve the soft looking on the fabric. Looking alright so far, will have to make a turntable render to see if it is ok.

Here's the normal color map and a brighter version:

End of my one month holiday

2011-03-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

Today..... sadly is the last day of my one month holiday. I didn't get to travel anywhere but to work on this Tomahawk project at my own pace. So, a report on what I have done so far...

Basically I have finished model ling a Marine soldier(full body) and a MP4 weapon. UV is done too and has started texturing and lookdev. Instead of completing all the textures at one go, I preffer to texture and lookdev the head first to get a feel of what sort of textures would be needed for the final recipes.

The head model on the left is a reuse of the Ryan model I did a while ago. It has all the facial expression setup I need when putting it into actual shot. However, I have edited its UV for the reason that the common way for making the UV is always splitting it on the side of the head. The UV on the nose and lips will always suffer bad stretching, no matter how good the UV unwrap would be. Therefore I am cutting it straight from the middle of the front face, and seperating the eyes and lips in the UV unwrap.

Begin of a long journey

2011-01-03T04:37:00.000-08:00

Here I am, the begin of a long journey, probably gonna take me a year to create this little project. It is not an animation short, I just wanna to create realistic images and put that onto a super slow mo turntable. I have once thought of the topic of Animal in Actions but for some reason, I just love to create human characters, and so I have chosen US Marine as my subject. The name Tomahawk is just a platoon name I found on the internet, and also its the name of the first asset I did in my new company back in Singapore. A meaningful name for me.