Posts Tagged ‘Render’

Speed Doodling Session - Male Bust

3 Comments // Aug 18, 2008 // Posted in Sketchbook

Alright, time to post another speed doodle, I’ll keep these babies coming until I’m completely satisfied with my speed vs quality before moving on to make complete character projects with the new techniques I am developing for myself.

This is approximately a 4 hour sculpt from the first drawn ZSphere in ZBrush until the final textured render in LightWave 3D, as seen below. Let’s call it a small Sunday evening project.

Click to enlarge

Of course, it’s far from perfect, but with the small amount of time spent, I’m pretty happy with it. I could tweak it for a few more hours to make it shine a bit, but that would defeat the purpose of my speed modeling/sculpting/texturing/rendering sessions.

I started this time as well by placing a few ZSpheres and then converted them to an adaptive skin, ie. a polygon mesh. I tweaked the low poly mesh to get the proportions somewhat how I wanted them, and then just kept going by subdividing, detailing, subdividing, detailing and so on, until I had reached about 2 million polygons. I didn’t use any references but just kept going and let the character evolve by itself as I went along and the details started to come through.
A few screenshots from the different stages of my sculpting can be seen in the image below.

The progress in ZBrush, from ZSpheres to detailed sculpt

I spent around 2 hour in total with the sculpting part of the character. At this stage, I would have retopologized the mesh if it was a real project, so I could animate it properly, but as this wasn’t the case I exported the low poly version to LightWave together with a displacement map.

Below is an ambient occlusion render of just the mesh with the displacement map in LightWave.

Male Head - Speed Sculpting - Ambient Occlusion Render

Well, well, then I spent around 2 more hours, painting/creating the color map, specular map and the bump map in ZBrush and Photoshop, as well as setting up the shaders and lighting in LightWave for rendering, which ended up as the image at the top of this post.

I’m getting closer to move on to bigger things, but I’ll probably make an additional doodle or two in the coming week.

Working Music: Joan as Police Woman - To Survive

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Doodle, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Texturing, ZBrush

A new female head - speed doodling session

No Comment // Jul 11, 2008 // Posted in Sketchbook

I took a few hours tonight and had another speed doodling session. I worked from my imagination with this one, with a goal set to as fast as possible get a decent looking character. I really need to get a speedy workflow in modeling characters for some of my upcoming projects, so I’ll probably make a few more similar doodles around this theme.

Click to Enlarge - Quick LightWave Setup and Render

The image above was created from scratch from the first polygon to final render in about 3-4 hours. This was mainly a ZBrush project, but I did end up rendering it out in LightWave 3D at the end. If I had spend some time on bulding a skin node network in LightWave and worked a bit on the hair it would probably have ended up pretty decent looking, but I’m saving that for the next time.

Anyway, I started this project by making a few ZSpheres and sculpted and pushed around the mesh from there, going up in level of detail now and then, trying to capture the basics of the female facial form as much as possible. Check out the image below for a few screenshots from different times in my sculpting process.

ZBrush Sculpting Workflow

At this stage I felt I had got most of the structure down as I wanted it. As sculpting from a few ZSpheres in ZBrush doesn’t create a decent topology, I included fixing the topology to my workflow this time.
To fix that, I roughly painted out directly on my character how I wanted the topology to flow, somewhat close to what I like, and then I used that model with my paintover as a template, building my new topology on top of that. When I had my new topology in place, I projected my sculpted details back into the new mesh. Here is three additional screenshots; The original topology - My paintover - The final topology.

Click to Enlarge - Retopology Process in ZBrush

Alright, the third one looks much better, so to end this session I made some basic texture painting as well. I didn’t bother with painting any Subsurface Scattering, Specular, Diffuse maps and so on this time, I just wanted to get some texture down and painted a simple color map. Here is the color map rendered in ZBrush with a basic skin shader applied.

Finished Texture Painting in ZBrush

And to close out this doodling session, just for fun, I exported the model out of ZBrush and brought her into LightWave. I made a quick and dirty wig with some hair strands, just a few minutes worth of work, and then rendered out the image at the top of this post.

Well, that’s it for this time. I shall return.

Working Music: Markus Krunegård - Markusevangeliet

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Doodle, Female, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Texturing, ZBrush

Female Head - Speed Sculpting Doodle

No Comment // Jul 04, 2008 // Posted in Sketchbook

A 3 hour speed sculpting.
I haven’t used ZBrush for a while, so I doodled around in it for a few hours today, to get the groove back. The image below is the result of a couple of zspheres and then just playing around, sculpting out the basics for the female form. I wasn’t going for accuracy or realism this time, just trying to get the shapes down and having some fun with it.

Click to Enlarge - ZBrush Speed Doodling Session

I could probably go on for a few more hours, keeping on refining and improving on her looks, but that would take the speed out of speed doodling. When I ended my sculpting session I exported her out of ZBrush together with a displacement map, and made a quick and dirty render in LightWave 3D, which is the render above, trying to capture at least some mood.

Actually, I think it’s pretty healthy to do a doodle now and then, to give myself some time to explore some new tools and techniques in my applications which I might not dare trying out when I do real projects. I’ll probably try do this somewhat regular to work on my speed and nail down better techniques.

Sculpting Music: Reyn Ouwehand - The Blithe, The Blend and The Bizarre

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Doodle, Female, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, ZBrush

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!

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

Destrachan - Finished

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

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

Destrachan - Painted and Rigged

1 Comment // Aug 15, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Destrachan

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

Destrachan - Sculpting is finished

4 Comments // Aug 09, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Destrachan

As Siggraph is this week, most companies in the industry have new exciting things to present or release. And yesterday was definitely Christmas for me. I was like a kid in a candy store with all the new toys I got. ZBrush 3.1 (Outstanding update!), Vue 6.5 and LightWave 9.3. So I kept myself pretty busy checking out all new features and fixes.

Anyway, my Destrachan project is progressing. I have finished the sculpting of this little guy, so I thought it was about time I posted a few renders.

Destrachan - Final Sculpt

Destrachan - Final Sculpt - Side shot

Destrachan - Final Sculpt - Anoter angle

I had a few adventures before I perfected my pipeline on how to bring my ZBrush sculpts into my other 3D applications in the best way possible. The above renders are all done in Modo. I will do the final renders in LightWave 3D, and I had thought I should do the above in LightWave as well. As LightWave doesn’t have micro polygon displacements I ran into trouble with all the details in this character. The new APS in LightWave helped a bit but I simply couldn’t get all the details I had sculpted to show up in LightWave without running out of memory. LightWave do have pretty poor memory management when dealing with high quality displacements at the moment. I really hope LightWave 9.5 will bring micro polygon displacements so these things will be fixed once and for all.

So I decided to give Softimage|XSI a spin instead. It’s a very nice 3D application in many ways, and I really enjoy how well everything is integrated, the history stack, the powerful node system and all those things. But when coming to displacements it turned out to be even worse than LightWave. Can you imagine? It takes forever even to initialize the renderer when increasing the displacement quality in XSI. Being used to the snappy workflow in LightWave I just couldn’t take it. No XSI for me at the moment.

So for the renders above I ended up using Modo. With Modo it just works and it simply rocks with displacements. Modo didn’t even stop to think for a second when I added my high resolution displacement map and cranked up the quality. Without any real time difference Modo just rendered this guy out with all the details like a breeze. Amazing. If Modo just would have had animation, volumetrics, hair and nodes I would definitely use it as the backbone of my pipeline.

Anyway, as Modo doesn’t have those things at the moment, I had to work out another solution for my current and future projects. And luckily ZBrush 3.1 was released yesterday, where among other things the missing Normal Map exporter was added again. And boy, did that fix everything for me. Combining a displacement and a normal map in LightWave from ZBrush just gives me excellent results, with a very low rendering time. So now my pipeline is complete again. And after all experimenting the last few days I have found a very efficient workflow now I hope. We’ll see shortly.

Alright, to end this post, here is some screenshots from ZBrush of some of the different stages from the sculpting phase.

A few shots from different levels of sculpting in ZBrush

Well, I just started painting this guy tonight, and that shouldn’t take to long, so I will probably have him painted shortly in a new post. And I’ll probably end it this project before hitting the final render in a scene with adding a basic animation rig. I mean, this guy needs to breath some life as well. Until next time…

Music Tonight: Slayradio

Tags: 3D, Art, Creature, modo, Render, Sculpting, Work in Progress, ZBrush

The Pod Bay - Winner in the Vue Environment Competition

2 Comments // Aug 07, 2007 // Posted in Announcements

The Pod Bay (Click to enlarge)

A few days ago I posted an entry that my image, The Pod Bay, was selected as one of the twelve finalists in the Vue 3D Environment Competition 2007. Today, at Siggraph 2007 the final winners was announced. I was happy and surprised to see that my submission was selected as one of the three winners in the competition as second runner up.

The judges consisted of leading experts in the 3D entertainment industry coming from the companies - Industrial Light & Magic, LucasFilm Animation, Polygon Pictures, Electronic Arts, Psyop, Whiskytree, 3D World magazine and Softimage - motivated the choice of The Pod Bay as one of the winners with the following comments:

“A great work. Very interesting design and a great composition.”
“I like the fact that I’m wondering what they are. I keep feeling like they’re a part of a much bigger (science fiction) story that I’m not quite clued in to yet.”
“All parts are well-arranged to produce the impressive colors.”
“It vaguely reminds me of the Myst series of games!”

I needed to get up to speed with Vue and thought this competition was an excellent opportunity to spend some time with the software. This image was the result of some of my experimentation and it took me around one day to complete from start to finish. It was a very pleasant experience for me to get to know Vue better. It’s a very capable application and amazing in many ways, and I will for sure make it an integral part of my pipeline for upcoming work.

I didn’t want to make just a plain landscape render, so I came up with this idea of some Alien Pods populating my environment to bring some interest and excitement into the image. Postwork wasn’t allowed, which created a challenge for me to get as good render as possible straight out of Vue. I usually do a lot of post processing on my images after they have left the renderer like color correction, adjusting balance between elements, combining render passes and many other things. The Pods are modeled in LightWave 3D and then imported into Vue where I sculpted the landscape and the other assets. The texturing, vegetation as well as the lighting and final render is Vue all the way.

You can now also find this image in my 3D Portfolio.

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

Destrachan - The Sculpting is almost there

No Comment // Aug 06, 2007 // Posted in Characters & Creatures, Destrachan

Let’s see, things are moving forward, so here is just a quick update. I’ve been working on finetuning my sculpting and get some finer details in place. Here is a render of where I am at the moment.

I'm almost finished with the sculpting of the Destrachan

I made the render above in Modo by taking my low resolution base mesh and exporting a displacement map from ZBrush of all the details I had sculpted.

I do all my sculpting using my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. By using a pressure sensitive pen I get the exact control and the feeling of working with real clay as close as possible for a digital environment.

I think I am almost satisfied now. I have a little cleaning up left to do and some additional finer details to add, but not very much. Then the sculpting phase is over and I can move on to the next steps in making this guy come alive. I will post a couple of images from different angles as soon as the sculpting is completed, with some additional step by step images.

On a related note. I do record some of my sculpting sessions to video. And I am about to get my server space extended ten folded this summer as well as the bandwidth. So as soon as my space is upgraded I’ll start posting some video sessions in the blog now and then to go with my posts. And other than recording my sculpting sessions I’ll also be able to more sporadically post animation tests and so on. This will be fun!

And to end this post, I had a little mouse adventure. My trusty Logitech MX 610 Mouse died on me last night. The LMB was worn out, but it had served me well for over two years. And fortunately I don’t use my mouse while sculpting in ZBrush, I only use my Wacom tablet with the pen for that, I can’t see how one could sculpt with a mouse? But I do all my LightWave work with the mouse, so I would need a replacement immediately. Luckily, one of the nicest persons I know came by me this morning and dropped of a brand spanking new Logitech MX Revolution mouse as a replacement. Wonderful mouse, perhaps the best one I’ve ever had. Amazing precision and the grip is excellent. And lot’s of programmable buttons. I’ve already configured it for LightWave, like this;

Forward = Select Loop, Back = Drop Selection, Search = Single View On/Off, Thumb Wheel Forward = Expand Selection, Thumb Wheel Back = Contract Selection, Thumb Wheel Click = Expand All, Mouse Wheel Tilt Left = Hide Selection, Mouse Wheel Tilt Right = Unhide. Wonderful setup and gives a great boost to the workflow. I am in love with it already!

Working Music: Beirut - Gulag Orkestar

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Creature, modo, Render, Sculpting, Work in Progress, ZBrush

Pin-up morning doodle

No Comment // Jun 24, 2007 // Posted in Sketchbook

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.

A quick ZBrush Pin-Up doodle I made this morning

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Doodle, Female, LightWave, Pin-up, Render, ZBrush