There has passed some time since my last update of my character Katana. Last time I posted a progress of her I was in the texturing, shading and hair phase. Since then I have improved my skills so much in topology and anatomy so I just couldn’t stand to see her mesh anymore, so I took it back a few steps and went back into the modeling phase to fix her up a bit. She was a bit reluctant at first laying down under the knife, but at last I talked her into it.

So I just wanted to post this quick update of where I am with her at the moment, with her anatomy update.

I am by no means finished with the anatomy changes, but the image above shows some of the progress I’ve made so far. I have given her better proportions on the skull and the overall body shape. Started defining the shoulders, neck, crouch, stomach and so on much better. I will post more detailed shots from several angles and closeup wires as soon as she comes off the operating table, sometime tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed everything goes well.

Modeling Music: The Whitest Boy Alive - Dreams

CG Society just announced CG Challenge XXI - Strange Behavior.

Excerpt from the challenge website:

“The CG Challenges are the largest online art contests of their kind, with huge amounts of sponsorship and publicity for each challenge. Working within guidelines and software limitations, artists are challenged to create outstanding artworks based upon set themes while showing their work-in-progress to the community.”

Strange Behavior.
25 June 2007 - 29 October 2007

The unexpected can delight or shock. It can be exciting or frightening.
It’s often funny. It’s never boring!

This challenge draws on one of the most popular artistic themes – unusual behaviors and relationships. Whether it’s a giant robot admiring a fluffy teddy or a sheep in wolf’s clothing; a cow that thinks it’s a helicopter or a warrior going into battle dressed as a giant pink bunny – they all make you stop and think. They also stimulate discussion – what one person finds funny another thinks is demented. Unusual juxtapositions and humor allow us an unprecedented freedom of expression. They can also bring us closer as we laugh together and at ourselves.

Entrants are required to bring to life Strange Behaviors in the most entertaining, humorous and emotive way.

—–

My thoughts:

I have always wanted to participate in one of these challenges, to see what I can come up with. This time around I actually think I have the time available until 29th of October to be able to submit an entry to one of the categories that’s appropriate for me. Illustration or animation, I think I’ll have to pass on short film.

I’ll go on vacation in 8 days from now, so I have tons of things to complete before then, so I will let this challenge rest for a few days, but on my vacation I’ll have plenty of time to brainstorm together a concept for my entry, and then I might actually be on my way completing a piece for this one. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Sunday morning. I woke up early today, and just felt like spending this lovely morning doodling around a bit in ZBrush. This is what came out after a quick session.

It’s based on the character from my last work in progress post which I’ve been working on in LightWave 3D. I just exported her out of LightWave at her current state and sculpted away for a while in ZBrush. This gave me the opportunity to get into using sub-tools, transpose control as well as polygon painting and materials in ZBrush at the same time. Well, this was just something I made for fun to get the day started. I’ll post my progress of the LightWave version of this character this evening.

Morning doodling Music: Camera Obscura - Let’s Get out of this Country

Lately I’ve been dedicating almost all my polygon modeling time towards the art of the female form when I haven’t been ZBrushing or recovering from dental surgery mayhems.

This character is going to turn out to be something really special, and I’ll have her finished right next to my Kat(ana) character. I just wanted to post an entry about her to get this modeling thread going as well in the blog.

As can be seen, I haven’t really worked on the head yet, but been deep into working with getting a good anatomy topology of the body. I’ll work with this character this weekend, so I’ll have a new post with her on Sunday with better closeups of all the details and the final body modeling in place.

For quite some time I’ve been studying the female anatomy and the belonging topology a great deal to improve my modeling skills in that area as much as I can at the moment. I really hope this character turns out to be very good in that respect. I must send many thanks and kudos to Steven Stahlberg for all the great advice and information I’ve got from him and made myself get into a better habit of research and planning of my models in an early stage. I wouldn’t have learned so much and increased my understanding in this area if I hadn’t got the opportunity to share some of his knowledge. And I have learned to don’t fear the n-gon as much as I used to. ;)

I don’t think this particular character will get any ZBrush treatment. Polygon modeling has its own elegant charm, even though I really do enjoy sculpting. But there is a time and place for everything. And it feels pretty good to be working just inside LightWave’s modeler again. It gives me a very cosy and warm feeling to puzzle and spin all polygons in place.

On an unrelated note, I started editing together my 2007 showreel earlier this week, and it will go online in July. Details to come later.

Modeling Music: The Sounds - Dying to Say this to You

There’s been lot’s of ZBrushing in the log lately, but I’ve continued working on among other things my Katana character piece at the same time.

So while I was in LightWave 3D today modeling on Kat we talked about accessories. Yes, you do actually have to talk to your characters while modeling them. How else will they spring to life? And we decided that I should get her a Katana sword. I cleared out my screen and modeled together this piece of weaponry for her.

And here is an occlusion render and the wireframe of the above sword.

Alright starting to get time for a new update on the progress of how she is coming along as well. She told me she was eager to get a public appearance again. Stay tuned for an update of her shortly unless any new zbrush doodles surfaces first.

Modeling music: Architecture in Helsinki - In Case We Die

It was time! Time at last to bring one of my creations into another renderer than ZBrush. I doodled up something in ZBrush and moved it into LightWave 3D for rendering this time. Below is a rendering of my only 2470 polygons large mesh inside of LightWave with a displacement map.

It did actually take some time and experimentation until I got it right, but in the end I did find a good flow for the process of getting ZBrush data into LightWave 3D.

I started with a quick doodling session in ZBrush. The usual procedure. Draw out a couple of ZSpheres to get a base mesh, divided it a couple of times, and sculpted for about 30 minutes to get something with enough details in to work with and find my flow between the applications.

It took a few turns back and forth and quite some head scratching until it worked smoothly. I ended up working in this way. First the ZBrush part.

• Bring the mesh down to the lowest resolution.
• Group the UV tiles (It’s not a pretty UV map created this way, but it was okay for this experiment as I wasn’t about to work on the map in any other application anyway).
• Enable adaptive displacement, raise the intensity to max, enable displacement mode and finally set my output resolution to 4096 pixels and run create displacement map.
• Export my base mesh with flipped quad polygons as an .obj file and also export the displacement map flipped vertically as a tif image.

And we’re done in ZBrush, let’s move on to the LightWave part.

• I imported the .obj in Modeler and turned on subpatching, saved it as an .lwo and moved on to Layout.
• In Layout I made a displacement node flow, consisting of the displacement map image fed into a subtract node. As medium gray in the displacement map is pushed out in LightWave and it’s supposed to be 0 in ZBrush measurements, I subtracted 0.5 from it. Then a multiply node to control the height of the displacement and finally I ended up feeding it into a scale node combined with the normal spot info node. Done, a perfect ZBrush displacement inside of LightWave.

Before rendering I enabled LightWave’s APS system, Adaptive Pixel Subdivision, and set a gradient on the Angle to the camera’s Z-Axis to get enough polygons for detailing at render time without killing the engine. And for fun I also slapped on a SSS shader node flow to make it a bit more interesting. F9! And we have a scene with 2470 polygons rendered as 1.4 million polygons with lot’s of lovely details!

Here is a tiny visual step by step guide all the way from ZBrush into LightWave ending up with an Ambient Occlusion render.

I hope this information will be found useful to some people.

Anyway, next time I will make the final step, bringing one of my 3D meshes out from LightWave and into ZBrush, sculpt details on it there and then bring it back to LightWave again for rendering.

Oh, and by the way, the swedish Göteborg blogmap at bloggkartan.se.

Doodling Music: Air - Pocket Symphony

A small update on the doodle I posted earlier today.

I wasn’t completely happy with the look I got from the default rendering settings in ZBrush, so I spent some time reading up on the different settings and how they worked. So I just wanted to post a new version of this doodle with some improved settings. I’ve turned on edge anti aliasing here to get rid of the jaggies, added some perspective, improved the shadow settings. And also just had some fun painting my sculpture for a few minutes to make it a bit more interesting. Enjoy this cutie! :)

Still listening to: Koop - Koop Islands

I’ve continued my explorations into the ZBrush universe and this is what popped out. I love the freedom to just mindlessly sculpt in this application. Hope you enjoy it.

I’ve been into improving my ZBrush skills for about a week now I can say this software is truly amazing and will for sure improve my existing workflow. It’s so nice not having to fight the software, and I’m feeling free in the application and have found myself thinking more like a traditional sculptor. Yes, I am really having fun! :)

While working on this piece I realized I have to think a little bit more about topology of the base mesh, before jumping into the the finer detail sculpting. This will be less of a problem when I get into importing my meshes I create in LightWave, as I am very careful with the topology modeling in LightWave. But this sculpt was, like my second doodle two days ago, made completely inside of ZBrush, with the base mesh built from ZSpheres. When working with the details around the eyelid area as well as the genitals I realized I didn’t have enough polygons driving the sculpt in the background to be able to work as precise as I needed to do there. I could divide the mesh another time, but then I would get a great deal of details added to areas where I didn’t need it. Waste of resources in other words.

Well, this was doodle number three, so I am still learning, and on my next ZB doodle I’ll not make this mistake again, and make sure I put denser details in the areas where I need it from the beginning. Here is some screenshots from the different stages. ZSpheres -> Adaptive skinning -> Sculpting in the details -> Render in a clay material.

Gonna read up a bit on working with topology inside ZBrush next, to have better control of my sculpts I create inside ZBrush, and see what I come up with next.

ZBrush sculpting music: Koop - Waltz for Koop

I’ve continued my exploration within ZBrush 3, and had a one hour doodling session today (I haven’t forgot about my other projects, updates will come shortly on those as well). But I am really falling in love with the intuitive way of working in ZBrush so I will continue investing time to really get confident with this package, so I can use it in many of my upcoming projects.

The ZBrush doodle I posted yesterday was my first attempt to create something in zbrush 3, and was done with blocking out the shape with a sphere brush, convert it to a polymesh and then pull, push and drag around the clay from there. It got quite messy and lot’s of stretched and overlapping polygons. It’s almost impossible to control the topology working in that way.

So today I improved my workflow in ZBrush and used zspheres instead and got into the habit of using them to create a much better base mesh to work from. Nice and controlled topology, much quicker to work with and which therefore also resulted in a much nicer result. From the zsphere created base mesh I made a few divisions to get the details I needed to sculpt out all the finer details.

And from starting with an empty canvas to the creature I ended up took about an hour. Amazing, this would have take so much longer to model and sculpt in a traditional 3D package. Can’t wait to continue getting deeper into zbrush and start exchanging data between LightWave 3D and ZBrush.

Todays doodling music: Calexico - Feast of Wire

As ZBrush 3 was recently released, I’ve finally started taking the time needed to fully learn this lovely piece of software. Lot’s of more things for me to explore in this package, but I am getting there. Here is a doodle I made this morning just after I woke up while drinking my morning coffee. This weekend have been dedicated to ZBrush.

This doodling took about 30 minutes from an empty canvas for me to sculpt. I made it entirely inside of ZBrush beginning with the sphere brush and working from there. Just having fun with the sculpting tools. I don’t know what it is really, I was just playing around. It does take some time getting used to this way of working, being used to dragging and pulling vertices for years, and now moving over to this form of almost clay sculpting.

But I love it, and I can’t wait to continue digging into ZBrush and making it a major part of my pipeline for my pieces.

Doodling Music: Slayradio