Just a quickie…

I’ve been developing my workflow for my film project for some time. I want to have a rock solid pipeline setup so when I go full blast I can aim all my focus at the creative parts. So far I’ve concentrated mostly on the asset exchange, getting meshes and animations in and out of the different applications I am working with, as painlessly as possible. I am pretty happy with where I am at this point.

I’ve also put in much thought into the rendering pipeline, which of course also is really important to get right. So far I’ve mainly be working with animatics and test renders, so I haven’t had to set the rendering pipe in stone yet.

One thing I have decided on is to render everything to a floating point image format. Which has led me back into the dreadful lairs of color management. Again.

I did some lame attempts with color management a few years back, got myself a Spyder 2 calibrator to work with accurate colors. But after the calibration I couldn’t get my head around it with different profiles. Colors started to mismatch between applications and other mysterious things. I ended up uninstalling it and selling the device after a month. I’m pretty sure it was good hardware, but handled by a crappy operator. ;)

Anyway, when doing my initial tests with a floating point rendering pipeline, I encountered the gamma differences between the screen and the rendered images, as FP formats work in a linear gamma, and the screen does not, which led me back into reading up a lot on the subject. The gamma difference is an easy fix, but the control freak in me was not happy that I did not understand completely what was going on, so I’ve studied color management a lot more this time around.

A happy coincidence was that Gerardo Estrada just wrote an interesting article on the subject in the HDRI 3D magazine issue #18 and #19, proposing different workflows with linear color management in LightWave 3D, and have also been very active on the NewTek forums lately talking about the subject.

And that Sebastian Goetsch has just released an excellent set of tools for LightWave 3D, enabling an easy workflow for color management and ICC profiles right within LightWave 3D. Wow!

Well, well, as I’ve spent quite some time understanding the subject this time, and done tons of tests the latest week, I think I’ve actually got the hang of Gamuts, Gammas, ICC Profiles and a color managed workflow through the entire pipeline this time. Will even get myself a Spyder again to get my screen accurate, as I believe I can handle it this time. ;) In the end, which also my tests have shown, having a linear color corrected workflow do enhance both realism and quality of the renders and removes a lot of the obstacles associated with image manipulation. So it’s well worth the time to get it right.

As soon as I’ve implemented a decent, good quality, easy to maintain system/movie player to showcase animations and film clips on my website and blog, I’ll start posting some rendered sequences, and with that also write some more detailed text about my complete pipeline and workflow for my film project.

I’ll definitely also return to this subject and write a decent text or article in the blog about my color managed pipeline when I have had my film project in the rendering phase for some time.

I’m not posting any renders this time, but to not make this post lack images completely, I’ll just snap a photo of my latest McFarlane action figure I got the other week, standing happy on my work desk. :)

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

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!

It was time! Time at last to bring one of my creations into another renderer than ZBrush. I doodled up something in ZBrush and moved it into LightWave 3D for rendering this time. Below is a rendering of my only 2470 polygons large mesh inside of LightWave with a displacement map.

It did actually take some time and experimentation until I got it right, but in the end I did find a good flow for the process of getting ZBrush data into LightWave 3D.

I started with a quick doodling session in ZBrush. The usual procedure. Draw out a couple of ZSpheres to get a base mesh, divided it a couple of times, and sculpted for about 30 minutes to get something with enough details in to work with and find my flow between the applications.

It took a few turns back and forth and quite some head scratching until it worked smoothly. I ended up working in this way. First the ZBrush part.

• Bring the mesh down to the lowest resolution.
• Group the UV tiles (It’s not a pretty UV map created this way, but it was okay for this experiment as I wasn’t about to work on the map in any other application anyway).
• Enable adaptive displacement, raise the intensity to max, enable displacement mode and finally set my output resolution to 4096 pixels and run create displacement map.
• Export my base mesh with flipped quad polygons as an .obj file and also export the displacement map flipped vertically as a tif image.

And we’re done in ZBrush, let’s move on to the LightWave part.

• I imported the .obj in Modeler and turned on subpatching, saved it as an .lwo and moved on to Layout.
• In Layout I made a displacement node flow, consisting of the displacement map image fed into a subtract node. As medium gray in the displacement map is pushed out in LightWave and it’s supposed to be 0 in ZBrush measurements, I subtracted 0.5 from it. Then a multiply node to control the height of the displacement and finally I ended up feeding it into a scale node combined with the normal spot info node. Done, a perfect ZBrush displacement inside of LightWave.

Before rendering I enabled LightWave’s APS system, Adaptive Pixel Subdivision, and set a gradient on the Angle to the camera’s Z-Axis to get enough polygons for detailing at render time without killing the engine. And for fun I also slapped on a SSS shader node flow to make it a bit more interesting. F9! And we have a scene with 2470 polygons rendered as 1.4 million polygons with lot’s of lovely details!

Here is a tiny visual step by step guide all the way from ZBrush into LightWave ending up with an Ambient Occlusion render.

I hope this information will be found useful to some people.

Anyway, next time I will make the final step, bringing one of my 3D meshes out from LightWave and into ZBrush, sculpt details on it there and then bring it back to LightWave again for rendering.

Oh, and by the way, the swedish Göteborg blogmap at bloggkartan.se.

Doodling Music: Air - Pocket Symphony

The development phase has been going on for years and what originally was supposed to be ZBrush 2.5 now finally hit the streets as a more significant upgrade, and got the 3.0 extension instead. Pixologic has worked hard on this update and it has been well worth the wait! Woohoo!

I just got my upgrade link about an hour ago, so I have just started to check it out, but my first impression is Wow! I’ve had a ZBrush license for quite some time, but I never got around to learn it fully, but now I’ll definitely invest the time needed to learn and utilize this package in my coming projects. This will marriage nicely with my Wacom and I really want this to be an essential part of my pipeline from now on. ZBrush doodlings will come in the doodle category shortly! For Sure!

You don’t get closer to working with real clay, in a digital environment, than this.
This sculpt and painting package is truly awesome!

• Pixologic website
• ZBrush 3 Info

ZBrush 3 first impression music: Belle & Sebastian - The Boy with the Arab Strap

Already into February and I haven’t yet posted a blog entry in 2007. The two first months this year have been unbelievable hectic. I had to rearrange a lot of things and start planning how 2007 should work out for me. Anyway, the first blog post of the year is finally here.

The image above is the cover of my 2007 manual. For the curious, other than the cover it’s a 12 page manual containing everything I intend to accomplish this year together with how I should work and dedicate my time to actually realize those plans. It also contains some other goodies related to artwork, like my different pipelines and how I most efficient shall utilize them. Perhaps not much interest to others than myself, but if there’s interest I might share it down the road.

Other than writing a manual, which of course isn’t the only thing I’ve made so far this year I’ve been working on a few commercial projects and have set off a bigger project together with some other talented artists. And at a parallel path I’ve come a long way with my first one-man CG short. I’ve wanted to make a few CG shorts for a long time, with me doing everything from screenwriting and directing to the modeling, texturing and animation. It’s been difficult for me to find time for that, but now it seems like my first movie soon will leave my domain. More about this within the next weeks. The first movie is anyway completely developed in LightWave 3D.

Even though I haven’t blogged about it, I’ve expanded the gallery at the site with two new images this year as well. I have had a license for Luxology’s Modo for quite some time in my toolbox, but haven’t got around learning it deep enough to use it seriously until now. And I really love that software. It do bring back the fun in CG art. It feels good not to spend time fighting the software as it often happens in this business.

This guy was started and finished tonight. I have been having a cosy evening drinking a few Dry Martinis myself so I thought why not make one in 3D as well, and I wanted to work a bit more with shaders in Modo, so this was a good opportunity, and as I had the reference to work from standing on the desk next to my workstation it was just a given.

Check out a higher resolution render here.

And this one I made last month. It was my first Modo project and I’m into 60’s retro at the moment, so this was a must do. It also fitted well to submit to CG Sphere, obviously.

Check out a higher resolution render here.

Tonights Working Music: The Magic Numbers - Those The Brokes

Oh yes, I really couldn’t help myself. I’ve been glaring at those 24″ screens for too long now to resist it anymore. I’ve been running 24″ at work for some time, and really enjoy the extra size. And it’s been pretty lousy sitting at home staring at the same resolution of 1920×1200 at my laptop 17″ screen. So now when Dell had a good deal at their new 2407wfp screen I jumped on the train and ordered one which arrived yesterday.

I’m already in love. It’s so pleasant to work in front of. Now my upgrading frenzy will have to rest for a while so I actually get some time over to get some work done in the evenings.

The refurbished workspace in my apartment with the new baby.

Luckily I got the rev A03 of the screen, which all of the problems that I’ve read about with earlier revisions of vertical banding and such are nowhere to be seen, the image quality is as close to perfect as it can be, according to me and my preferences.

Oh well, back to doing some artwork now… until next time…

Weee, I got around and upgraded my old workstation this week. I’ve been running on a Dell Inspiron 9300 with a Pentium M 2.0GHz processor for about a year now. It has served me well, but I have been drooling to get a Core Duo processor since it’s release. And now when the Core 2 Duos where available I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Anyway, I got my new Dell Inspiron 9400 the other day with a Core 2 Duo processor and some other goodies, and have spent the last days configuring it. It does take some time to set up all my software from scratch on a new machine, but finally everything is perfect, just the way I like it.

The creative corner in my apartment.

The new Core 2 Duo processor really is a dream come true. It renders about three times faster than my old PM 2.0. I haven’t had this huge leap in rendering performance since the middle 90’s in the Lightwave 4.0 era, when I made the jump from my trusty old Amiga 4000T with a 060 processor to my first Windows based workstation, a Pentium 133MHz machine which were running circles around my Amiga when using Lightwave.

Now more than ten years later, that feeling has emerged again. It’s a joy to press the F9 button to render and have blazingly fast results pumped out to the screen.
Some quick numbers I did to compare the Pentium M 2.0 and Core 2 Duo 2.0 when rendering the same scene in a couple of 3D applications on both the PM and the C2D, both machines are equipped with 2GB RAM.

• LightWave 9; PM: 39 minutes - C2D: 15 minutes.
• Modo 202; PM: 4 minutes - C2D: 1 minute 32 seconds.
• Vue 5 Infinite; PM: 7 minutes 42 seconds - C2D: 3 minutes 13 seconds.

Wonderful difference, and will make a big impact on my workflow. I couldn’t be happier with this upgrade. Also the GeForce 7900 GS card in the machine makes the OpenGL viewports a joy to throw real heavy meshes at.
Just drooling over a 24″ screen to go with this setup on my desk sometime in the future.

Setting up music: Anna Ternheim - To Be Gone (EP)

I’ve been beta testing a new 3d/image browsing software from Senosoft. It’s turning out awesome with support for all high end formats like OpenEXR, FLX and HDR. Lot’s of things are in the works for it. It’s a very interesting development for coming versions of this software. And Yarp is just the greatest guy, and doing a wonderful work!

Check it out at the Senosoft website!

Oh yeah! Luxology finally released Modo yesterday after years of development!
Modo is the new 3D Tool built for Artists. And I AM IN LOVE!
Such an amazing modeler. Check it out: Luxology’s Modo