Journal - Page 3 | Johan Steen - 3D Portfolio, CG Artist

It’s here, LightWave 3D 9.6

20 January 2009No Comments

LightWave 3D 9.6… Woohoo! I just wanted to add a quick shout that version 9.6 has been released today and is available for download over at NewTek.

I’m so happy with this release, as about every quirk I had with 9.5 is gone. Actually there is over 600 fixes and feature requests implemented in 9.6. It’s been a long beta cycle for this version, but it’s been worth it. Being a longtime LightWave user myself (since version 3.5) this is without a doubt the most impressive and stable LightWave version released, ever! It’s indeed exciting times for LightWave users these days. Well, all info about 9.6 is available at NewTek’s site, so no point in posting them here. LightWave 9.6 is already doing an excellent job for me producing wonderful renders in a fraction of a time of what 9.5 did (together with all the other new goodies), and it’ll keep me more than satisfied until they bring on version 10.

Just wanted to share some nerdy application joy. Now it’s back to work, in the shiny new release build of 9.6.

Turntable – Give the model a spin

15 January 20099 Comments

I love turntables, I think they are an excellent way to display a model. I got inspired of what Pixologic did with their ZBrush turntable gallery, so I dusted of my old flash knowledge and implemented a turntable function, as I was anyway doing some fine tuning to the site design.

Screenshot of the Flash Turntable Viewer

If you want to use it for your site, you can download the Turntable Viewer here »

Now when my portfolio update finally is around the corner, I wanted to have something like this to accompany the content I’ll put there. And it will also come in handy for my ZBrush sketches and doodles here in the journal. So expect to see lot’s of more turntables to spin around in here.

Skin and hair updates on Elly + bonus FiberFX script

07 January 20092 Comments

I had some time tonight to make a few small updates to Elly. It’s getting closer to completion.
Here’s the latest render test, the hair definitely needs more work…

Todays update of Elly, added first draft of Hair.

I didn’t have so much time to work with this tonight, but since yesterday I have done a few things anyway.

I cleaned up some more of the textures, and improved the skin shading network with some additional subtle SSS added to it to get a warmer tone to softer parts of the skin. I tweaked her left eyebrow a tiny bit so they are not completely symmetrical, and finally made some hair render tests of the hair guides I’ve been working on for her, rendered with FiberFX in LightWave. I still have to do quite some more work to the guides, as well as work on the hair material. The shadow from the hair for the above render is pretty rough, so it looks a bit soft and strange in some regions. I will raise the quality of the shadow when I have all guides in place where I want them.

That’s it for tonight, a few tips will follow below, other than that, I hope I have some more time tomorrow to spend on this project.

Here is my node network for the Simple Skin material I have used on Elly together with the settings for the Simple Skin material. Many settings are driven by texture maps, which I have painted in ZBrush. I have also blended in the SSS2 shader for some additional SubSurface Scattering control. I love the SSS2 shader, so fast with beautiful quality.

Simple Skin Node Setup (Click to enlarge)

Bonus FiberFX Script

FiberFX Button

Here’s a small LScript, which simply allows you to add FiberFX to your layout menus. If you use FiberFX often like I do, it can come in handy. It’s much faster to have FiberFX attached to a button than to have to Ctrl+F8, drop down the menu, select FiberFilter then double click. This script does that, and when FiberFX is added to the scene, it opens the FiberFX panel with the button. I find it to be a convenient time saver and I have added it to my Workflow tab in Layout where I have all my most used tools collected.

Download Open_FFX.ls

Over and out, Cheers!

Resurrected female model – painted and shaded

05 January 2009No Comments

Okay, a few hours has passed since my earlier post and it’s time for me to call it a night. Naturally I couldn’t completely finish her in this amount of time, as it’s quite a tedious task creating a detailed CG character. But I came pretty far though.

Second WIP of this model - Texturing and shading almost completed.

I more or less completed painting the textures, and that’s where I devoted most of the time I spent with her tonight. I ended up with a diffuse map (color map), epidermis map, subdermis map, occlusion map, reflection map, fresnel map, bump map and a normal map. Phew! With those maps fed into the simple skin material in LightWave 9.6 blended with the SSS 2 (SubSurface Scattering) shader I got the above skin material.

I also worked on the eyes, where I used the SSS 2 shader as the base for the eyeball material. Other than working with textures and shading, I added the eyelashes and eyebrows, blocked in the beginning of a top for her and started blocking out some hair guides too.

So I’m pretty happy with the progress tonight. What’s still left to do now is some final polishing on the textures and shading networks, completing the work with the hair guides and finish her top and maybe one more accessory to equip her with. If I’m in the mood I might do a minor rig to make the final pose a tad more interesting.

Tomorrow is a working day, but hopefully I’ll have some time in the evening to continue this project.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I named her as well, so the lady in the render above is called Elly, hello Elly.

Resurrecting old projects – Female model

04 January 2009No Comments

It’s Sunday afternoon, all the dreadful holidays stealing precious time are coming to an end, so what’s better to start of 2009 than by doing some house cleaning. I’ve let the axe work it’s way through my folder of unfinished projects with no mercy. It was time to kill some darlings where just too much time had passed, I really didn’t want to work on those anymore.

What I was left with, was a couple of personal projects that have been untouched for some time, but that I’d get much personal satisfaction from to complete. And with the massive axing done, I was left with six projects (in contrast to over 30 unfinished ones) which I hope I can now have a clear focus on and finish them one by one.

With the release of LightWave 3D 9.6 around the corner, with it’s improved hair rendering and new lovely shaders and updated materials, I’m craving to take them for some serious test drives by doing some character work.

So, first out is this female character bust, which I created in one ambitious day back in February 2008. I’ve just spent some time examining the state of the project, going through the mesh and the textures. And here is a render of her current state how she was left in her project folder for almost a year.

The current working state of this model (Rendered with a slightly too narrow DOF)

The modeling is more or less done, but the textures are mostly just blocked in and need quite some more work. I will spend the rest of the day and evening with her, and see how far I’ll come.

What’s left to do to have her completed as I currently see it;

Fixing a few edge loops in the overall polygon flow.
Cleaning up the textures and repaint many sections of the current maps.
Update the shader network to utilize some of the new goodiness in LightWave 9.6.
Model proper eyeballs and texture/shade them.
Model and style a hair wig as well as brows and lashes.
Model a few accessories for her.
And finally baptize her, she has got to have a name, doesn’t she?

And that’s pretty much it. Oh well, let’s see how far I can take her towards completion today. It will be a couple of entertaining hours, as I love when I have some time to spare for my own projects and character work. Which is also the times when I evolve my techniques the most as well.

Happy 2009 everyone, and I hope this will be a more active year blogging wise for me than the past year.

Style your hair guides – ASE Spline Importer for LightWave 3D

30 December 2008No Comments

ASE Spline Import LightWave 3D has some excellent rendering options for hair, the native FiberFX as well as the Sasquatch plugin from Worley Labs. Unfortunately the actual creation and styling of hair guides is still a bit cumbersome in LightWave, which is a shame really as the quality of the renders can be of outstanding quality.

FiberFX has done some progress in the effort of bringing hair styling tools into LightWave, but it’s still not as powerful as you can find in some other applications. And in the day and age of the common multi application pipeline you simply use the best tool for each job, if you have access to them. In my case I’ve have 3ds Max at my disposal, which has some pretty good hair styling tools. My problem was that I couldn’t find any decent solution to transfer the guides from 3ds Max into LightWave unless I shelled out another 2 grand. So I ended up writing this little LightWave modeler tool that imports hair guides (or splines really) via Autodesks ASCII Scene Export format, .ASE.

Check out my ASE Spline Import page for more details and to download the tool.

If you find this tool useful, I hope I’ll see some really nice hair renders surfacing in the LightWave community.

Fix Symmetry Plugin for LightWave 3D

14 September 20082 Comments

Fix Symmetry is a LightWave 3D modeler script I wrote for my own personal use some time ago. I recently polished it a bit by giving it a decent GUI and some more options, so I could release it. I hope some of you might find the tool useful in your workflow.

It’s a more elegant symmetry correction solution than my SymmXMirror tool as it’s non-destructive, but they both have their time and place when appropriate to use.

Fix Symmetry offers three different functions to help taking care of symmetry problems in objects while modeling. Symmetry Check, Quick Fix and the interactive Tolerance Fix.

Check out my Fix Symmetry page for more details and to download the tool.

Have fun and enjoy!

Artstorm Reloaded, please update your feed URL

02 September 2008No Comments

I have wanted to change a great deal of things on my website for quite some time, but it’s always a bigger project than one anticipates to make major changes, so it’s been on my list of things to do when I have some time to spare. This weekend I finally put aside that time to get my hands dirty with this update.

Other than making a new design, the structure of the website has changed. And for the few subscribers I do have, the URL to the feed has changed. I’ll have the old URL redirecting for some time, but to make sure you keep the subscription live, please update your RSS/feed reader to the new correct URL.

The RSS feed for artstorm.net is now located at: http://www.artstorm.net/feed/

Anyway, I was so bored with my old design, and it was way to much work to add new portfolio items and such so I didn’t really bother keeping it updated. Which was pretty evident as most images in the portfolio was from 2004 and not much has been added since.

Well, I’m thrilled to finally have got rid of the design in the screenshot below, I was so bored with it.

Artstorm V3 Design - Now put to eternal rest!

I’ve been using Wordpress for the blog part of my site for about a year, while the rest has been my own PHP/MySQL scripts that I’ve put together when time permitted. It was a pain keeping the code updated as well as going through all the necessary steps when I wanted to add new content to the site.

And as I’ve seen Wordpress progress the last year, I’ve felt for sometime that it had everything I needed to drive every part of the site with it. So I threw out all my own scripts, installed Wordpress for the entire site and spent the weekend making a new, fresh look to get rid of that old depressing brownish disaster.

Well, I’m very happy that I took the time to do this update, and I managed to fix almost everything during the weekend, I just have some minor things left to tweak (mostly texts) and then I can let it go and just focus on adding content. Woohoo!

Well back to work, new stuff to be added shortly!

Speed Doodling Session – Male Bust

18 August 20083 Comments

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

LightWave 3D – A great speed modeling application

17 August 20086 Comments

About a year ago, I wrote a post about customizing modeler, since then I’ve completely switched to a 64-bit environment and with LightWave 9.5 just released, it was about time for an updated version.

LightWave 3D was once known as the fastest polygon and subdivision modeler on the market. The modeling workflow was considered one of LightWave’s strongest features and this held true up until v7.x (2001). Then the years passed and because of different reasons the modeler became neglected, in the v8.x (2004) update the modeler was pretty much ignored and when 9.x (2006) was released the modeler still didn’t receive any significant changes. So what we have here is a former state of the art modeler that hasn’t received much love in 7 years except for a few minor updates, acquired 3rd party tools and some halfbaked additions. This has lead to that the competition has caught up and even surpassed LightWave in this time.

Do we have to wait until LW10, which supposedly will get the long awaited modeling updates? Or can the current release be tweaked to still be a top modeler for a speedy workflow? According to me the latter holds true.

My LightWave modeling experience goes back to LW v3.5, so I know it pretty much inside and out, and my recent experience with other modeling packages comes to using Modo quite regularly and also to some extent I model in 3ds max when I do on location work. Even though Modo is the most elegant modeler I’ve ever worked with, it do still lack a few operations (which I guess might be added when 401 comes) and 3ds max has also grown a lot as a modeler in the last couple of years, and is very competent by now.

Still though, when it comes down to it, I do model with an incredible speed in LightWave compared to the other apps I am comfortable modeling in.

The “secret” to unlock the current LightWave’s modeler to a compentent speed modeling package consist of four important steps to learn and change in LightWave:

Learn the keyboard shortcuts.
Get some brilliant plugins.
Customize your modeling menus.
Use your extra mouse buttons.

Learn The Shortcuts

I can’t stress this enough! If you keep spending time switching between tabs and menus in modeler each time you change the active tool, you’ll never get a speedy modeling flow. Spend all the time needed to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Force yourself to use them as much as possible until they become second nature. Print a shortcut reference card if needed. The time spent learning these will save you so much time in the end it’s worth every second. I always keep one hand on my mouse and the other hand on the keyboard while modeling, to jump between the common tools I use in a split second. The less time spent digging through menus for tools, the more time spent pushing vertices around.

The must have LightWave 3D plugins

Fortunately the LightWave community is blessed with having many brilliant 3rd party developers, which have created additions that fills up about any gap lacking in the out-of-the-box modeler, bringing the modeling experience up to par with other packages. Some plugins are commercial but many are free.

Since the release of LightWave 9.5, where FFX and FBX are available native in LightWave and most plugin developers have by now compiled 64-bits versions, I made the decision to completely switch to 64-bit LightWave. Still, as not all plugins I relied on in the 32-bit era are available as 64-bit compiles, I had to sacrifice some or find replacements.
Here is my current must have modeler plugin list, all available in 64-bit versions:

Missed babies:

Pictrix brilliant modeling plugins (PX_Clone, C_Worm etc…) is still 32-bit only. Pictrix just released SP_Move as 64-bit, and have promised that the others will follow soon though. RopeEditor, TrueHair and Pawel Olas plugins (TreeDesigner, Leaves Generator…) would be cool to have as well, but they are no show stoppers.

Also if you do any kind of hard surface modeling, LWCad is the best investment you can ever make (64-bit version available).

Customizing Menus

The default menu configuration, even when using the Studio Production Style layout, doesn’t do it for me. As it’s not feasible to have every tool mapped to a key (and remember it) and the mouse just have so many buttons, one still have to rely on selecting tools in the menus now and then. To avoid having to look for tools and break my modeling flow, I have designed five new tabs that are more logical to me.

Custom Tabs in Modeler

Depending on what I do in modeler, I have a tab for each task. If I model, I have my modeling tab selected, where I have all the tools that I use which is not mapped to a key, available right next to my modeling area so I never need to switch tab while modeling. And the same for all other tasks, tabs for texturing, rigging, hair and the fifth for the 3rd party tools which I only use occasionally.

The Modeling Menu

This is my customized tab I use when modeling. Combined with my mouse configuration and assigned shortcuts, I almost never ever leave this menu during a modeling session. I primarily model organic shapes, so the tools I switch between is pretty much aimed in that direction, but there is a few for hard surface modeling as well, which is more or less what I need in that area most of the time.

Modeling Tab

Add & Reduce

EasyMesh - An excellent tool, that works like XSI’s tweak tool or Modo’s element move. Drags points, edges or polygons depending on what you click on when dragging, no need to switch mode. And with the RMB it extends geometry. A really fast tool to tweak geometry and quickly build up new shapes.
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.
BandSaw Pro – Cuts a loop of polygon in as many rows as needed.
Rounder - Create rounded edges or use it on a single vertex and it works as a chamfer tool.
Dissolve - Removes an vertices, edges or polygons from the mesh.
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.
BandGlue - Glues together two rows of looping polygons to one band.

Edges

Edge Slide - Slides Edges on the mesh while preserving the shape.
Easy Split - An excellent tool to cut in new topology directly on the mesh, almost like drawing.
Swift Edge Loop - Slides edge loops with the LMB and adds new edge loops with the RMB. A great boost for the edgeloop workflow.
Add Edges – Adds new edges between 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.
Divide - Splits an edge in two segments.
Spin Edge - Spins an edge to adjust the flow of the topology.
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.

Curves

Spline Draw - Draw a new spline.
Add Points - To add more points to existing splines.
Patch - Create solid geometry from splines by patching them together.

Detail

Untangle - Adjusts the selected polygon’s vertices into a circular shape.
Flatten - Quickly flattens the selected geometry on the axis of choice.
Drill - Perfect for making details by stenciling shapes in the background layer onto the geometry.

Modify

SpMove 3 - The ultimate move tool. There is no move operation this one can’t perform, including all kinds of snapping.
Translate - Great when used with RMB, as it then translates the geometry along their normal axis.
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 you come to an interactive smooth scale. It moves vertices or polugons along the normal axis. I use this quite a bit now. With some cleanup afterward 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.
DragNet - Pretty similar to Magnet but the drag tool with fall off instead of the move tool.
Weights - Set weights for Subpatch Subdivision surfaces.
Create Pole - Collapses n-gons into tris.
Fix Poles - Fix a poled part of the object into quads with a small sections of tris in the middle, which helps to create clean subpatches.
Absolute Size - Let’s you numerically enter a defined size for your object when scaling.

Tools

Fix Symmetry - Select a point of each side of the X axis and this tool makes them symmetrical.
SymmXMirror - Corrects the entire mesh for symmetry errors if such should occur. It does it the hard way by cutting, mirroring and merging the mesh.
Toggle Backdrop - Toggles the backdrop images on/off, when reference images is used in the background.
Polygon Coloring - Prepares a new version of the mesh to be rendered with a subdivision wireframe for a pretty presentation of the object.
Subdivision - The subdivision tools in a drop down menu; G-Toggle Subpatch, Set CC, Set Face, Set Subpatch.

Organize

Create Part - Creates a new part of the selected polygons.
Sketch Color - Changes the sketch color of the selected polygons.

Selection

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

Sel Points
Sel Polys
Sel Edges
Loop Expand
Loop Contract

Texturing, Rigging and Hair Menus

Click for fullsize

As this post is dedicated towards a fast modeling workflow in modeler, I won’t go into any great details about my other customized menu tabs other than a brief overview.

Just like my modeling tab, these live their own lives and tools gets added or removed as I update my workflow or adapt new techniques or tools. So they are never final.

The hair tab has a few empty sections as can be seen in the screenshot, TrueHair and Hair Blade is missing. They are leftovers since I was running a 32-bit install and these plugins are not yet available for 64-bit. I’ve kept them around though, as I hope 64-bit versions of them will arrive in the future.

Other than that, the menus are pretty self explanatory, check them out, dissect them and see if you like the mix of tools and how I’ve grouped them. As I have been mainly into modeling and rendering with LightWave the last year, these menus have not got as much attention as they should have probably.

If you are interested in using my menus, or use them as a starting point to create your own, feel free to download the attached zip file where I’ve exported the four menu branches. To use them go to Modeler’s “Configure Menus” window, where you can right click on the “Main Menu” entry and select “Import Branch” to add my menus as new menu tabs.

Download my LightWave 3D 9.5 Custom Modeling Menus

Setup your mouse

I have come to understand that many people doesn’t use the power of their mouse when working with LightWave 3D. A customizable multibutton mouse is definitely the way to go, by assigning a couple of convenient keyboard shortcuts to the extra buttons.

Personally I use the Logitech MX Revolution at the moment, a mouse I’m very happy with and which has so many extra buttons thanks to the thumb wheel, that I haven’t decided what to map to the last buttons yet. If anyone have any suggestions for what would be nice to add to the scrollwheel’s tilt function, feel free to send it my way.

Modeler Mouse Setup

I have a huge difference in my modeling speed compared to when I model without my mouse shortcuts, it shaves of a great deal of time each day, and as the days go by those saved minutes adds up.

Conclusion

Take the advice that works for you, adjust and tweak the rest to your liking, and I am sure you’ll find that LightWave’s modeler still contains tons of power for a fast modeling workflow.

Happy speed modeling!

Page 3 of 14«1 234 5 6 7 8 9 10 »...Last »