I’ve recently put up an unofficial plugin section on artstorm. I don’t really code anymore, and I don’t have any intentions to return or dig deeper into the world of coding either these days, as I am just to much in love with my 3D work. But I do from time to time write a few scripts when I need a tool that’s currently not available and it’s within my reach to quickly develop it. So when I finish a script I’ll put it online there, so they are available if anyone else might find use for them besides me.

This section won’t be linked from the main menu of my site, but feel free to bookmark it or link to it from any other site, as the section will be there permanently.

I recently published the SymmXMirror tool that’s available there, and also the SaveIncBak modeler script the other day, which was born from a thread on the NewTek OB forum where Miguel Méndez Menéndez posted the idea for the tool. Also many thanks to Miguel for tracking down the differences between the Windows and Mac file system through LScript to get it working on the Mac platform as well.

I do have a few other modeler tools that are more or less working as they should which I’ll upload quite soon. I also have some scripts I’ve developed while working with my film projects for basic render pass management. As I’ve made them for me, the GUI is lacking big time, so I have to spend some time cleaning that up before I can release them in a state useful for others. So it might be while before I can spare the time for that.

Well, over and out for tonight.

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!

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)

I haven’t blogged anything since I got back from my vacation. Things have just been crazy since I got back, which made my personal projects suffer a bit. I’m gonna get back on track now though.

To get my juices flowing and get back in the groove I started a new project today (again… hehe). Well, this will not be a long project, just me playing around with a new character, or creature really, of mine.

As I’ve been spending quite some time getting up to speed with ZBrush 3 lately, I wanted to make a project from start to finish using ZBrush so I get some reward for all the hours I’ve put into that application so far. I do think all my hours will pay off and that I can get an image through all the steps required in quite a short time. Or so I hope.

I have to admit, back in the 1980’s I was an addicted Role Player. Playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (and the Swedish version Drakar & Demoner), as well as other RPG’s like Mutant, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Kult and Chock. Well, even though I haven’t been into that for almost 20 years now, it’s an enormous well to collect inspiration from. So I dug up my old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual and started hunting for a nice creature to sculpt in 3D. I had a hard time to decide, so many ultra cool creatures in that universe, but finally I went with a destrachan.

A short extract from the destrachan description in the Monster Manual to give you a clue what this creature is all about:

The dungeon-dwelling destrachan looks like some bizarre, non-intelligent beast, but it’s an incredibly evil and crafty sadist. The creature shambles forward on thick, taloned legs. Vaguely reptilian in form, its large, stooped frame ends in a mostly featureless head dominated by large ear structures and a gaping, toothless mouth.

Alright, so I took a good look on the illustration in the Monster Manual and started up Photoshop and sketched out a quick modeling sheet with my Wacom, tried my best to draw an orthographic side view so I would have something to work from when starting to build the polygon mesh. And this concept sketch is what I came up with.

Nothing fancy really, but it fills its purpose for this stage. Anyway, after I had finished this sketch, I started up LightWave 3D, loaded my sketch into the background and started modeling out a base mesh. And after about half an hour I had something I was happy with. Not very detailed, but I got the basic shapes down and the edgeloops located where I wanted them. Here is a wireframe and a render of my base mesh of my destrachan model.

As can be seen, this base mesh is very low resolution, but it contains all the details and shapes I need to have a very good and fun mesh to start sculpting from. So time to bring this guy into ZBrush and bring out all the lovely details to make this creature come alive. This base mesh is just around 1400 polygons, which is a good starting point for ZBrush work.

Working Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium

This is a follow up to my post earlier today to share some of my modeling “secrets” to be able to model as fast as possible with LightWave 3D. Perhaps some of you out there will find this or parts of it useful.

I’m doing all my modeling in LightWave 3D 9.2 for my current project even though I was tempted to bring it into Modo for a while. But I’m using a few life savers which prevents me from going crazy which would be the case if I have had to model without them. So let’s start with my best tips for LightWave 3rd party modeling plugins.

• Weld Pro - Free plugin that works just like LightWave’s own Weld tool with the difference that it supports symmetry.
• DEdgeSlide - Another free wonderful plugin. LightWave doesn’t have it’s own edge slide tool (yet?), but I use this one all the time. I can’t see myself modeling without being able to slide edges anymore. The difference between sliding and moving an edge or edgeloop is that sliding tries to preserve the shape of the geometry.
• EasySplit- This one comes with a $50 price tag. And it’s worth every dime of it. It allows you to more or less draw in new topology on your mesh. Just draw in new edges with a single a mouse stroke. I find myself using this over and over when I’m changing topology or adding new edges. To just be able to draw in new topology is a major time saver. And guess what, it supports symmetry.
• PMirror - Well symmetry does get lost now and then when modeling. And this little free baby corrects it with a single push of a button. Oh, how many times I’ve pressed that button with a smile on my face. Beware though if you’re using Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces it doesn’t support it fully like it does with Subpatch surfaces, but just tab to polygon mode before running PMirror and you will be a happy camper.
• Connect - Well, this isn’t a 3rd party tool but it was introduced in the LightWave default toolkit with version 9.2 (or was it in 9.0?). Anyway, I thought I should mention it as I use it all the time now. It’s a great and quick way to add new geometry where you need it by just selecting edges, vertexes or polygons and run connect to create new edges between them. Preferably have it mapped on a hotkey as you’ll use it a great deal when you get used to this tool.

And also another small but oh so lovely tip. Use your extra mouse buttons! I have mapped some tools I use all the time on my spare buttons. I am blessed with having 5 extra mouse buttons on my current mouse. it goes like this:

• Back button - Drop Current Selection
• Forward button - Select Loop
• Mute button - Select Connected
• Volume up button - Expand Selection
• Volume down button - Contract Selection

Anyway, I know, strange buttons to have on a mouse, but it’s one of those Logitech Media mice. The MX 610 cordless laser mouse to be precise. But well, as they can be reprogrammed into something useful, it’s a pretty good mouse for 3D modeling.

And while I am into this minor tips and tricks session, another must do for the die hard LightWave modeler. Hokeys are great, but it can be hard to have every tool on a hot key, especially if you run out of keys or don’t feel like overloading your poor brain with 100’s of key combination for every program you are using. So what I do in LightWave is to setup a tab with all tools gathered that I am using in one place. So I have them available to me at all times without having to jump through different tabs or dig down inside menu hierarchies.

So this is my customized tab in Modeler for organic modeling, which I think covers everything I need at the moment for a speedy workflow while modeling. It’s a constant work in progress though as new tools or plugins are released but it’s a quick job to just exchange a tool on those rare occasion something new surfaces.

Quick and dirty Walk through…

Add & Reduce

• Collapse Polys - For those occasions where I quickly just wanna rearrange the flow of a group of quads.
• Bridge - Connect polygons with new geometry created in between.
• Cut - Cut a loop or selected order of polygons with the amount of cuts needed. No longer interactive since Lightwave 9, so I seldom use it at the moment.
• QuickCut1 - Predefined number of cuts. I have 3 rows cutted automatically with this one.
• QS Dbl Term - 2 rows quick cut with termination to prevent n-gons.
• BandGlue - Glues together two rows of looping polygons to one band.
• BandSaw Pro - Cuts a loop of polygon in as many rows as needed.
• Multishift - Bevel on steroids. Bevels in several steps and polygons can be grouped. And best of all, advanced bevels can be stored, either to disk or to memory. I use store to memory for instance when I have made a nice nail bevel on a character to quickly reuse it on the other 4 fingers.

Edges

• EasySplit - 3rd party plugin to draw new topology directly on the mesh.
• DEdgeSlide - Slides Edges on the mesh while preserving the shape.
• JW_WeldEdges - 3rd party plugin to weld edges together. Supports symmetry. It’s part of the Free JW edge pack.
• Dissolve - Removes an edge or loop of edges from the mesh.
• Connect - Connects edges, vertexes or polygons creating new edges between them.
• Spin Edge - Spins an edge. I like this better than Spin Quads, but Spin Edge seems a bit unstable at the moment in LightWave. It has crashed several times for me so I stick to Spin Quads for the time being and I hope the stability will be fixed in the next service update of LightWave.
• Add Edges - Adds new edges betwen polygons. It doesn’t support symmetry so since I got EasySplit I have more or less stopped using this one.
• Edge Bevel - Bevels an edge interactively.
• FI’s Wrinkle -3rd Party plugin. Free plugin that work like Edge Bevel but adds an extra edge in the middle which can be offset to quickly create a wrinkle in the geometry.
• Sharpness - Drop down menu which contains Set Sharpness, Decrease Sharpness and Increase Sharpness. To be used on edges when working with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces.
• JW Edge Pack - A free plugin pack containing 13 useful plugins when working with edges. Things like EdgeWalk is pretty handy and all of them are modeling speed boosters.

Vertices

• Move On Edge - 3rd party plugin. Moves a point along any of it’s connected edges, preserving the shape of the mesh.
• Weld Pro - 3rd party plugin, works like LightWave Weld tool but preserves symmetry.
• Weld Pro Config - Some settings for the Weld Pro tool, like symmetry on/off.
• Weld Average - Welds poins to their average position instead of to the last selected point.
• Weights - Set weights for Subpatch Subdivision surfaces.

Modify

• Thicken - Free 3rd Party plugin from DStorm. Allows you to take a single sided mesh and add depth to it. Great for building clothing from an extracted part of a character mesh.
• Thickener - Free 3rd Party plugin from Blochi. Works like DStorm thicken but is interactive. Interactive LScript was broken for a while in LightWave so that’s why I have both, but now it seems like that will be fixed, and then I’ll stay with Blochi’s.
• Point Fit - Free 3rd party plugin. Tries the best it can to fit a mesh onto the object in the background layer. Great for getting a roughly modelled piece of clothing to fit a character before getting into details.
• Smooth Scale - Scales polygons along their normal axis. Would love to have this interactive.
• Translate Plus - Moves geometry in a controlled fashion. Lot’s of options, but I mostly use the segment translation, where you can select an edge and have your geometry move in that exact direction. Very handy when extending polygons on a mesh that’s not laying perfect on the XYZ axis.
• Pnt Normal Move - This is the closest I get to smooth scale interactive. It moves vertexes along the normal axis. I use this quite a bit now. With some cleanup afterwards I get the results I am looking for pretty fast.
• Magnet - Move with a fall off - Great for organic tweaking. Like pushing cheaks or moving an ear and things like that.
• Vortex -Rotate with an fall off. Nice for making adjustments, like tweaking mouth and eyes when creating morph targets.
• Pole 2 - Size with a fall off. When you need to resize major parts of a mesh without messing it up to much.

Tools

• Make Symm - Select a point of each side of the X Axis and this 3rd party plugin makes them symmetrical.
• Symm Manager - Tries to find and correct all points that are not symmetrical. Can be a bit unpredictable but now and then it does a great job.
• PMirror - Always fixes the symmetry errors when they appear. It does it the hard way by cutting, mirroring and merging the mesh. I love this tool!
• Symmetry - Turns symmetry on/off. I have this placed under PMirror as PMirror needs symmetry off to function correctly so I can quickly do the procedure; Symmetry -> PMirror -> Symmetry and from a broken symmetry mesh I am back working on a fixed mesh in a second.
• Toggle Backdrop - Toggles the backdrop images on/off. When using reference images in the background.
• Subdivision - The subdivision tools in a drop down menu; G-Toggle Subpatch, Set CC, Set Subpatch, Set Face.

Selection - All these tools are selection related and needs no explantion me thinks?

• Sel Connect
• Expand
• Contract
• Sel Points
• Sel Polys
• Sel Edges
• Mirror Select
• Create Part
• Sketch Color
• More Selections - A drop down menu containing all other available selection tools in LightWave in one place.

And as this was a organic modeling post I won’t go into other tabs, but I can mention that other than my organic modeling tab I have a few other customized tabs setup for different phases of the creation process. Those other Modeler tabs I have setup are as follows:

• Texturing
• Rigging
• Hair
• Plugins
• Visualization
• LWCad/LWCad Ext.

How those tabs are designed is subject for some other posts in the future when I do work in those phases of my modeling process. And if there is some interest that I share my setups of course.

Anyway, I hope this was a useful post, and feel free to ask me any questions!

Well well well, when you get into reworking something like I have done here with Kat’s complete topology it’s bound to take a little bit longer than expected. But here’s a quick update until I’m completely finished with her. Aiming on tomorrow, but you never know. Anyway, here’s an OpenGL screenshot of her new hand in it’s current state compared to the old roughed out placeholder.

It’s getting there, but I still some tweaking to do until I’m completely happy. Originally I intended this piece to be quite a quick one to improve my work with edgeloops. But since then I’ve got so much into anatomy and correct proportions so I’ve changed my mind and instead I am now aiming for this character to be my most detailed and realistic character yet to this date.

Today I’ve been working on all parts of her body, adding details, especially on her back, adding all the small things like hints of the spine, shoulder blades and lot’s of small bones under the skin. I’ve most details in place but I have a few hours of pushing and pulling vertexes around until I get the nice smooth surface on top of everything that I want to have. I’ll post more images as soon as I am there.

And what you all been waiting for…
Todays Modeling Music: Her Majesty - Happiness

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