Saturday 31 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Turnaround


This is the first frame of his turnaround.  

Edit: I'm going to  render a separate hair pass to composite over the top of this so I can have a little more control over the hair.

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Transcription - Trow



Just thought I'd add that these are test renders. It will need some work with regards lighting and tweaking the skin texture. I thought I'd composite it onto a photo just to see how convincing it could look.Tomorrow I plan on posing him.

Monday 26 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Additional Hair & Clothes


There's still lots of work to do but it's really getting there. I also sorted out the camera focal distance so his head is now the right size.

Transcription - Body Hair


I've started on the body hair here, chest, shoulder, armpit and nipple.

Sunday 25 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Clothes


Well I can honestly say that CG clothes are really hard to make. Here I've modeled a waistcoat that has been made from burlap, but it needs some work. The black holes between the stitching are meant to be transparent and show skin, like the tear you can see. The alpha map is working but because i extruded it to give thickness a kind of drop shadow has been created making it only possible to see the transparency when the camera is directly perpendicular to the holes. This I will fix by deleting the inside extrusion faces all except on the outside hem.

It's also quite apparent that the back scattering on the skin shader needs to be turned down much more than I previously thought. On a plus side I'm really happy with the razor shell necklace.

Thursday 22 March 2012

Maya - Physical Sun and Sky


With the physical sun and sky the time of day can be changed by changing the angle of the directional light. straight down will be noon.


Pointing at the camera horizontally gives sun up and sun down.  


Here I've adjusted the red/blue shift.


Saturation can be decreased and increased. 


Changing the amount of haze in the atmosphere. 


 Shadow softness and samples.

Maya - Mia Material X


Preset architectural mental ray shader.

Maya - Particle Pointers




Maya - Particle Tree Paint Effects

Maya - Particle Walking Robots


Transcription - Trow Tweaking


I've made the lower eyelashes, and tweaked it all here and there. I'm leaving this as is for the moment and moving on to modeling clothes ect.

Maya - Particle Fish



Transcription - Trow Eyelashes


Originally I tried to make the eyelashes using the hair system but I couldn't get the to look or behave like eyelashes. In the end I've used Maya fur which for this purpose was much easier to control. They need thinning out slightly and the corners tapering (also needs the bottom ones) but other than that I think they work. I've also made the eyes look a little more convincing, I think.

Wednesday 21 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Head Update


This is much better, I've fixed the texture problems I had in the last render, fixed the hair colour (it may be a bit bright though), and put a smidging of ambient occlusion on there. All the hair is still a work in progress as regards the style. Next on to the eyelashes.


Here's the latest render. I've shaped the beard (it still needs messing up), worked on the eyes, and the head hair (although still not thick enough.

EDIT: I thought it looked a bit dark and I just realized that a couple of the skin shader textures had come unplugged. I've just fixed this and In a while I'll update this post with a newer render with the hair the correct colour. I've also been working on the skin colour texture to make it have a little more of a dynamic colour range.

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Transcription - Test Beard



Couldn't resist rendering it with the skin shader on too :)


Here's a test beard. It's a bit too long and needs to be messier but I'll work on that later.

Maya - Particle Arrows


Maya - Displacement Maps


Software render


Mental Ray render


Using approximation editor on irregular geometry 1


Using approximation editor on irregular geometry 2


Approximation editor with polygons


Approximation editor with nurbs


Maya - Particle Rockets


Monday 19 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Eye Detail


It may seem trivial but in this render I've made a few small tweaks. Firstly I've modeled a small piece of translucent geometry where the bottom of the eyelid and the eye ball meet, it makes it look as though the is a small build up of fluid there. Secondly I've made the first 2 rows of the eyelid pink and lastly I've modeled the small piece of flesh in the corner of the eye. 

Transcription - AO


I've added a small amount of ambient occlusion and made the textures for the nails.

Transcription - Specularity


Here I've been playing around with the specularity to make the skin look less like wax and more like skin. This is the best I've got it so far.

Transcription - Trow Veins




I've painted in blue/green veins on the subdermal texture which come throught due to the subsurface scattering.

Transcription - Trow Render


After much time spent changing setting in Z-brush and Maya for the dispacement maps this is where it is. Today I will be working on the texture maps to make them more interesting

Sunday 18 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Z-Brush


I've sculpted in some detail on the head in Z-Brush, I just hope I'm able to maintain this detail once the displacement map is added in Maya.


Saturday 17 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Textures


Today I started to make the textures (they're nowhere near finished) , they are 8K in size and I've plugged them into the overall colour, epidermal, subdermal, and specular of the sss skin shader. Tomorrow I plan on getting stuck into Z-brush to get some detail on the trow. I'm so glad I bought 8GB of RAM for my P.C. as I wouldn't have any hope of this getting done without it :)


I've done a bit of Z-brush work in the face (very rough) and just so I could spend some time in Maya playing with the displacement settings. I think here I have just  about the right settings so I will now make a displacement map to the whole trow over the next few days.

Thursday 15 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Geometry


Here it is, the geometry is nearly finished. Just some final adjustments to do before laying out the UV's and putting it in Z-brush.

Wednesday 14 March 2012

Transcription - Sub Surface Scattering Shader


I've added a skin shader here just to get it ready for when the textures are added. There's a light pointing towards the camera so the light penetrates the thin parts of the body, i.e. the ear.

Transcription - Trow With Legs

Tuesday 13 March 2012

Transcription - Trow Body


I've now started the body, just blocking in the structure here.

Transcription - Trow Head


Here's the trow head so far, still needs some work but it's getting there.

Monday 12 March 2012

Maya - Male Character


The shading network for this character to get the rim light effect was made by plugging a 'samplerInfo' node from the 'facingRatio' into the' vCoord of the ramp.

Maya - Depth Of Field


Depth of field using camera settings.


Depth of file, lens bokeh. The lens bokeh node is plugged into the mental ray, lens shader node.


Z-depth pass made by adding a render layer and changing the attributes to luminescence depth and setting the min and max ranges.