Archive for the ‘Characters & Creatures’ Category

Work in progress, behind the scenes and final renders of my CG characters and creatures.
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Resurrected female model - painted and shaded

No Comment // Jan 05, 2009 // Posted in Characters & Creatures

Okay, a few hours has passed since my earlier post and it’s time for me to call it a night. Naturally I couldn’t completely finish her in this amount of time, as it’s quite a tedious task creating a detailed CG character. But I came pretty far though.

Second WIP of Elly

Second WIP of this model - Texturing and shading almost completed.

I more or less completed painting the textures, and that’s where I devoted most of the time I spent with her tonight. I ended up with a diffuse map (color map), epidermis map, subdermis map, occlusion map, reflection map, fresnel map, bump map and a normal map. Phew! With those maps fed into the simple skin material in LightWave 9.6 blended with the SSS 2 (SubSurface Scattering) shader I got the above skin material.

I also worked on the eyes, where I used the SSS 2 shader as the base for the eyeball material. Other than working with textures and shading, I added the eyelashes and eyebrows, blocked in the beginning of a top for her and started blocking out some hair guides too.

So I’m pretty happy with the progress tonight. What’s still left to do now is some final polishing on the textures and shading networks, completing the work with the hair guides and finish her top and maybe one more accessory to equip her with. If I’m in the mood I might do a minor rig to make the final pose a tad more interesting.

Tomorrow is a working day, but hopefully I’ll have some time in the evening to continue this project.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I named her as well, so the lady in the render above is called Elly, hello Elly.

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Resurrecting old projects - Female model

No Comment // Jan 04, 2009 // Posted in Characters & Creatures

It’s Sunday afternoon, all the dreadful holidays stealing precious time are coming to an end, so what’s better to start of 2009 than by doing some house cleaning. I’ve let the axe work it’s way through my folder of unfinished projects with no mercy. It was time to kill some darlings where just too much time had passed, I really didn’t want to work on those anymore.

What I was left with, was a couple of personal projects that have been untouched for some time, but that I’d get much personal satisfaction from to complete. And with the massive axing done, I was left with six projects (in contrast to over 30 unfinished ones) which I hope I can now have a clear focus on and finish them one by one.

With the release of LightWave 3D 9.6 around the corner, with it’s improved hair rendering and new lovely shaders and updated materials, I’m craving to take them for some serious test drives by doing some character work.

So, first out is this female character bust, which I created in one ambitious day back in February 2008. I’ve just spent some time examining the state of the project, going through the mesh and the textures. And here is a render of her current state how she was left in her project folder for almost a year.

The current working state of this model

The current working state of this model (Rendered with a slightly too narrow DOF)

The modeling is more or less done, but the textures are mostly just blocked in and need quite some more work. I will spend the rest of the day and evening with her, and see how far I’ll come.

What’s left to do to have her completed as I currently see it;

  • Fixing a few edge loops in the overall polygon flow.
  • Cleaning up the textures and repaint many sections of the current maps.
  • Update the shader network to utilize some of the new goodiness in LightWave 9.6.
  • Model proper eyeballs and texture/shade them.
  • Model and style a hair wig as well as brows and lashes.
  • Model a few accessories for her.
  • And finally baptize her, she has got to have a name, doesn’t she?

And that’s pretty much it. Oh well, let’s see how far I can take her towards completion today. It will be a couple of entertaining hours, as I love when I have some time to spare for my own projects and character work. Which is also the times when I evolve my techniques the most as well.

Happy 2009 everyone, and I hope this will be a more active year blogging wise for me than the past year.

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Goblin - Revisit

No Comment // Jun 26, 2008 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Goblin

The summer is here, and I’ll have at least a month of free time, getting some things of the ground. To get my juices flowing I decided to finish some old projects that’s been sitting lonely for a long time, and by that be able to soon send a bunch of files to my archive drive instead of having tons of unfinished stuff in my project folder.

I dug up my old Goblin project, and had a session in ZBrush with him tonight.

The old Goblin project with some ZBrush doodling

The old Goblin project with some ZBrush doodling

I kinda liked where he was going now, so I’m gonna continue detailing him for a few hours and add some accesories to him and then see how it all turns out. If I am happy I gonna shade, texture and render him, otherwise he’ll hit the graveyard.

Working Music: The Concretes - In Colour

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Ninja: Resurrection

1 Comment // Apr 19, 2008 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Crash Test Ninja

Just a quickie, here is an old darling of mine which I recently resurrected… Fear his wrath!

Wrath of the Ninja

My Crash Test Ninja

This character was like 90% finished back in 2004 for a SpinQuad challenge / thing, which I never had the time to complete. I’ve been cleaning up my old folders and content directories, getting rid of old crap and revived a few things that had fallen into the dark shadows, hiding under the dust, but deserved to be brought back to life.

This Ninja guy is one the latter. Back in march I fixed his topology, made some new UV unwraps and updated his textures and created a new clean rig to animate him. This test render is also from march while working with the rigging.

I’ve always liked this character and have had some great fun animating him when I originally created this cunning Ninja, so I am pretty psyched about finally having the time to get him finely tuned and bring him to full life.

I’ve some diabolic plans of where he is heading, more to come soon…

Get ready for some tough, serious, Ninja action!

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Innkeeper: The texture game is on

3 Comments // Oct 12, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Innkeeper

At last, here’s a new update of my innkeeper character. Again, it took a little longer than I had expected since my last update, but I’ve had a few commissioned pieces of work that have come in between. Believe it or not, but they take precedence over my personal projects.

Anyway, today I got back in business with this guy again, and here’s the latest snapshot of his current state.

Innkeeper - Work in Progress - Texturing 1

First Texturing Pass on The Innkeeper

I’ve entered the texturing and shading phase. Since the last post I’ve created the UV’s for him and then spent most of the time building a decent skin shader. The texture maps used at the render above is just some rough placeholders I sketched out quickly to have something to work with when the skin shader reached the final stages. The color map is pretty wild and I’ll remake it from scratch for the next update, and other than that I used a simple normal map to get some structure going on. I’ll remake that one as well.

The skin shader though, am I pretty happy with now. It consist of a large node network built up around 2 SubSurface scattering shaders, 1 OrenNayar shader, 1Blinn shader, 1 Reflection shader and everything mixed together with some mixer nodes and gradients. I’ve tested this shader pretty carefully and it seems to hold up in most lighting environments.

I wanted to get this shader perfect before starting to work with the texture maps for real, so well, here I am. I have a photo session I need to do this weekend for a totally unrelated project, but other than that I think I’ll have enough time to start working on the real textures and post another update shortly.

Working Music: Babyshambles - Shotter’s Nation

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Innkeeper: Now the fun can begin!

4 Comments // Sep 26, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Innkeeper

I had some time tonight to continue working with this guy, so I finished up the modeling process of this project. Now the fun can begin!

The Innkeeper - Work in Progress 4 - No Hair

Untextured render of The Innkeeper

Since the last post, I’ve made tweaks all over the character, but I’ve mainly focused on the face to make him look a bit more interesting. Also for these renders I added a quick and dirty rig, so I could pose him and not have another boring T-pose render. The rig is far from finished, so he doesn’t deform perfect yet, but it was okay enough for these renders.

The Innkeeper - Work in Progress 4 - Hair

A bonus render with some quick and dirty hair

Alright, time to start texturing and create the shading for this guy. This is what I have been looking forward to the most this time, so I can’t wait to grab my Wacom pen and start painting. I will also fix the hair during this process. Stay tuned for another update coming soon!

Working Music: Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out of Season

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Another Innkeeper session

No Comment // Sep 19, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Innkeeper

Here is a few updated images of the progress of my Innkeeper character. I didn’t have time to work with him until today again. But now he is starting to come together after this session.

I’ve got rid of the strange pointy belly and added some more volume to it as well as some fat around the waist where the apron runs. Also I modeled a dagger for him and added some more details to the face, arms, hands and robe. The symmetry from the first modeling session is now about to run into the history land and I have started to get some more randomness to the different sides.

Innkeeper - Work in Progress 3 - Front View

The Innkeeper - Front View

Innkeeper - Work in Progress 3 - Right View

The Innkeeper - Right View

Innkeeper - Work in Progress 3 - Left View

The Innkeeper - Left View

I fixed some edgeloops as well this time which I was not that pleased with earlier, and it’s still pretty low poly for the amount of details. I have been thinking of using ZBrush displacements for him, but I’ll pass on that this time, and stick with normal maps in the end for the finer details.

I am not completely happy with him yet, so I’ll take him for one more modeling session for the final touches before I get into texturing this guy. Really looking forward to that part, as that’s my main purpose with this project.

Working Music: Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

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A small Innkeeper update

1 Comment // Sep 13, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Innkeeper

I just wanted to post a small update. I’ve had a very busy week so far, so there haven’t been so much time to work with this guy. But the modeling is starting to get in place. I need one more session with him and then the modeling should be more or less finished.

I have two more accessories left to model for him and some additional details to add to his body. I hope to be able to have that session this evening.

The Innkeeper - Work In Progress 2 - Side View

Update of the Innkeeper - A small pouch is added

The Innkeeper - Work In Progress 2 - Front View

The Innkeeper - More details added to the clothes

I make this project to improve my texturing skills, so I wanna spend the most time in that area. But I have also dedicated quite some time now to explore a new flow for my detailed modeling. I have experimented with a new method that I kinda am starting to like a lot.

LightWave 3D -> ZBrush -> Modo -> LightWave 3D.

My flow goes like this, I rough out the overall shapes I am looking for in LightWave, his body and his different pieces of clothing. Then I bring the meshes into ZBrush, one at a time, and start sketching and sculpting out the details, like wrinkles in the clothing. When I have something I am happy with, I export them out in hires into Modo. And there I rebuild the clothing from scratch again, using the hires mesh from ZBrush in the background. The Pen Tool in Modo in quad mode with a background constraint is just wonderful for this work of creating new topology on an existing mesh. So by doing it like this I get a pretty low polygon mesh, with an excellent flow of edgeloops with as much details as I can preserve modeled in, carefully laid out in Modo where I need them. And when I am done in Modo, the model goes back to LightWave to replace the first rough draft version.

Working Music: Beirut - Lon Gisland

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New Character Started - The Innkeeper

No Comment // Sep 07, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Innkeeper

I have another new project in the pipeline. A personal project where I want to perfect some techniques of mine. Mainly in creating lots of details in the models while keeping the polygons to a very low amount. But also to some extent texture painting.

So here is the first quick draft of a character called The Innkeeper.

The Innkeeper - Work in Progress

First rough draft of the Innkeeper

This is mostly a rough draft of this character. I’ve modeled the actual body and head in LightWave to get the overall look and proportions where I want them, as well as blocking in his clothing. His robe is where I have started doing some more work.

I have got quite some details modeled into the robe, while still maintaining a very low polygon count, so I am relying on a very nice topology carefully placed where needed for the details while still having good edgeloops so it’s animation friendly.

I am using ZBrush to sketch out the details I want in his clothing to then bring the model into Modo to redo the topology exactly how I want it. Retopologizing can be a pain, but I find Modo’s tools quite quick and intuitive for this kind of work.

I’ll continue modeling this guy all day, so a new post will follow shortly with more details.

Working Music: My Spy vs Spy Remix Album (Around from an old project)

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Destrachan - Finished

1 Comment // Aug 25, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Destrachan

Alright, Destrachan is finished and posted to my 3D Portfolio.

Destrachan - Finished

Destrachan - The Final Render (Click to enlarge)

I ended up modeling some sort of dungeon environment to put him in. I could probably have spent some more time with it but I wanted to finish this project, wrap it up and move on to new challenges.

I was about to make some animations with him, but I just have got to many things to complete right now, so I’ve put that part on ice. I might revisit this project in the future and add some animations. Time will tell.

A closer look at the model

Destrachan - Front

Destrachan - Front

Destrachan - Side

Destrachan - Side

Here is a few more renders to easier examine the model without any specific lighting or environment elements to distract from looking at our guy.

To the right you have two textured renders of him from different angles where I have posed him on a stand.

And below we have two images with renders of the model without any texturing at all, to better see all the details I’ve sculpted into him.

Destrachan - Before Texture Painting

Destrachan - Before Texture Painting (Click to enlarge)

Destrachan - Clay Render of the Beast

Destrachan - Clay Render of the Beast (Click to enlarge)

Wires and the UV map

Destrachan - Wires

Destrachan - Wires

Destrachan - UV Layout

Destrachan - UV Layout

And if anyone is interested, here is another two images, one with the UV unwrapped layout I created in LightWave 3D for him side by side with the acutal color map that I painted.

The other image is just an overlayed wireframe from the base mesh I modeled to use as a starting point for my sculpt, on on top of an occluded render of the same mesh with the displacement map applied to it.

I guess that pretty much wraps this project up. The complete process from when I started this project can be seen here.

Tonights working music: Anna Ternheim - Separation Road

P.S. Someone recently asked me why I always end my blog postings with the music I’ve been listening to. Simple answer, music is very important to me. It inspires me and I really can’t work efficiently without my music in the background. So the music plays a major part in all the work I create, so that’s why I feel to share the music I choose to help me set the mood for each session. Maybe my taste will influence someone out there to discover new inspirational music.

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