Posts Tagged ‘CG’

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

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!

Tags: 3D, CG, Character, LightWave, Plans, Render

There has been some unhealthy long periods of silence between my posts lately. The usual reason, commissioned work has kept me a busy bee. CG artists need to make a living as well - bills, bills and bills - unfortunately.

Some of my paid gigs are interesting and challenging though - gives me opportunities to tune my skills and dive into creating pieces using all my arsenal of CG tools which I might not have gotten into if I only worked with my personal projects. But still, some of the things I have planned to do for myself I really long to do. I’m working on a solution to switch between gigs and personal projects more freely, which seems to actually work out and become reality.

Anyway, I’ll probably be able to get back into posting regularly again, at least a few times a week. Starting from today. So now I don’t have any choice to not post, do I?

Even though my postings have been sparse I’ve spent a lot of my free time working on my projects. One of my different short films and animation projects have progressed rapidly, and I registered a new domain name for it a few days back, so it’s getting ready to be revealed real soon. Just a few weeks away for the initial release.

I’ve also been working a lot with my CG character development. Updates to those will be posted shortly. Just a quickie to go with this post to not make it completely boring without any images. A CG chick I’ve been trying out some things with in the last days. Modeling and sculpting is finished, currently working with textures and some hair guide styling.

A quick screenshot from the OpenGL view in LightWave with a temporary texture I’ve painted and the beginning of my hair guide styling.

Hair styling in LightWave

Posting to be continued in the next days….

Tags: 3D, CG, Female, LightWave, Plans, Work

Symmetry Plugin for LightWave 3D

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!

Tags: 3D, CG, Development, LightWave, Modeling, Pipeline, Plugin

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 in 3D World (Click to enlarge)

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. :)

Tags: 3D, CG, Challenge, Environment, LightWave, Science Fiction, Vue

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.

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Shading, Texturing

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!

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.

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Modeling

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.

The Innkeeper - Front View

The Innkeeper - Right 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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Modeling

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.

Update of the Innkeeper - A small pouch is added

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Modeling, modo, Sculpting, Topology, Workflow, ZBrush

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

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 - 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 (Click to enlarge)

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

Wires and the UV map

Destrachan - Wires

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.

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Portfolio, Render

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

Destrachan posing for the camera

Destrachan more posing for the camera

And even more camera posing

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.

The Destrachan - Rigged for easy posing

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Creature, LightWave, Painting, Render, Rigging, ZBrush