Long time, no post. Things are cooking though. Busy busy.

Anyway, I thought I should post a little freebie I coded recently. I’ve acquired a few new computers (Workstation, rendering slaves) and have made the switch to Vista x64 as well as LightWave x64 for 64-bit Windows. Fortunately most of the plugins I rely on are available for x64 or will soon be as it seems. Fiber Factory, TrueHair and Pictrix are the plugins I miss most for x64 at the moment.

Then there is the situation with smaller free plugins that probably will never be updated to x64 versions. One of my most used ones is pmirror.p by Pixel Potential that automates a technique by William ‘Proton’ Vaughan to correct symmetry. Pmirror.p is unfortunately only compiled for Win32 and OSX.

I really missed it in my Win64 environment so I wrote my own version using LScript, so other than working with Win64 (and of course Win32 and OSX) it should also work with LightWave for Intel Macs.

Basically the plugin selects the -X side of the mesh, flattens it, deletes it, mirrors the +X side and merges the points, which is really useful to quickly restore symmetry in an object if it gets broken. I added an extra method that tries to intelligently find the center through the object if it or some points has moved away from the 0 position. (Which is pretty common for instance in situations where the object has been brought to ZBrush and back.)

Check out the SymmXMirror page

Enjoy and have fun modeling!

3D World issue 97 (December 2007) just went on sale, and I am delighted to have my The Pod Bay image published in this issue.

The Pod Bay was my contribution for the Vue 3D Environment Competition 2007 and ended up in the 3rd place. 3D World Magazine runs a print of the winning images in the current issue. So if you get your hands on the latest issue you’ll find my image there together with the two other winning images by Julien Chabot and Dimitar Tzvetanov. Great work by you guys and congrats in the competition!

3D World is a great magazine for any 3D Artist, so it’s well worth a read for more reasons just than looking at our Vue images. :)

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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)

Alright, Destrachan is finished and posted to my portfolio pages.

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.

Anyway, I’m right in the middle of a another project , updates on that one will be posted tomorrow if not some unexpected events occur!

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.

Here we go. I finished painting my little guy in ZBrush the other day. So here is the final result rendered in LightWave 3D.

When I was at it, I also created an animation rig for him. So I can pose and animate him. Nothing fancy but all the basic controls needed are there. Some Inverse Kinemtics controllers for the legs, arms and the tail and just a Forward Kinematic for the body and head.

As he is completed now I have started working on a scenery where I can put him, and also make a short animated sequence in. Stay tuned for the next and final update of this project.

Working Music: Detektivbyrån - Hemvägen

Just a quick update, I’ve done the first pass of painting on the little guy, so I just wanted to post a progress image.

It’s getting decent, but I need one more session to work on him before I am happy with the textures and shading. I have done all painting of the skin texture so far in ZBrush and haven’t had any need to bring it into Photoshop so far. I will probably do some minor touch up in the end there I guess, but ZBrush has been just great to paint textures in. The above render is made in LightWave 3D, I didn’t bother to turn on the displacement map for additional details for this test render.

Well, I’ll continue painting this cute little pet today, and then he should be finished to be let loose in some scenery.

Painting Music: Gogol Bordello - Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike