GHM2 Hair Script Plug-In!!

For my female warrior characrter everyone has been asking me how I was going to do the hair, me unsure always brushing this off but not having a definitive plan i thought I'd work it out when I came to it with a combination of sculpting in zBrush and targa images. However I came across a hair script plug in GMH2 for Maya, the showreel made the plug in look really easy to use with amazing results. The aspect that attracted me to this plug in first was that it was very similar to the targa method of using transparent planes with images of hair, however this wasnt very high quality. The script take a surface such as a plane or tube and tells the hair to follow it.


Having only got the script yesterday I have already gained a good understanding of the controls available. There are many factors or attributes that can be changed to change the style of the hair. Here is a render of the results I am currently getting, I am really happy with this so far as it is already much closer to the original design.

Building and texturing an indian Bow & Arrow

Inorder to pose the character properly I needed to pose her with the bow and arrow that will be used in her final production, therefore I dedicated roughly 4/5 hours to creating the bow and arrows using Maya, zBrush and Photoshop. Im really happy with the final design, if this prop was a singular project of its own i would obviously dedicated alot more time to obtain a much higher level of detail.

Over all I am fairly happy with the resuly, I would like to add more decoration and detailing but will wait til near the end of the project to refine the detailing.

Female Character Progress Update

Lately I have been working on producing the female character shown using maya and z brush. Here is the anatomy that will be the base for the character, this will be rigged and posed with a bow and arrow as shown in the picture. I am pretty happy with how this sculpt went, I felt much more confident sculpting and feel I know have a much better understanding of topology for the human figure.





 Now that I had the basic form I then used mixamo and online rigging programme which if your character has under 10,000 traingle count it can be downloaded for free. I have used this before in previous projects and have always been happy with the results and ease of use. Now I had the character rigged I could now pose her, but inorder to do this properly I would need to pose her with bow, which still needs to be built.
 





 Once I have the pose I plan to take the mesh and refine the topology to make to sculpt as accurate as possible, I will then take this into zBrush to sculpt the muscles and paint the skin texture. I will also build the clothes and add hair around the sculpted mode.

Ofcourse Disney!

Having growing up with Disney I have become a huge fan and hugely inspired by the storylines characetrs and magic visual worlds that Disney have created over the years. Having been there since the beginning of animation with Walt developing the basic fundimental rules of animation the studios have developed with technology over the years. One of my favourite books is The Illusion of Life : Disney Animation, for me as an artist I found this book more useful and more informative than the animators survival guide, definately alot more intersting as it is filled with artowrk from throughout Disney. I really enjoy looking at the raw art work from the development of films and characters, this I hope helps me to gain an insight of the development processes the artists went through. I also find you can see how the character's personality was developed visualy.

 

Eternity NU

Eternity NU is a 3D artist who's work has come up alot recently on my facebook feed, in disucussion with other artists and on 3D websites such as CG society. From Bangkok he is a 3D Modeler Supervisor for Picture This Studio. I was drawn to this artwork as they are very similar outcomes to what I would like to achieve with my indian warrior character. Where the character is very beatiful and feminine yet fierce and not to be messed with.
Here he has also shown shots of his work flow whilst creating the final image of the character shown firstly. They model is very low poly and stylised with anatomy. This has given me insight into a posttible work flow to character my indian femal warrior character.
The way he has sculpted the hair on the characters is very simple yet effective, by taking a shape and scupled lare clumps of strands in, it retains a stylied quality.
Find more of their work here.

DreamWorks Animation

Growing up i would always get excited if I saw the boy sat on the moon fishing at the beginning of a film, this was because as a kid I knew that this meant it was going to be a good film. DreamWorks has creaeted many of my favourite animated films growing up including; Antz, Shrek, Chicken Run, Over the Hedge, Flushed Away, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and more recently the Croods. The have made a huge influence and contribution to the 3D animated feature films. They create beatifuly realistic yet stylised creatures and environments allowing audiences to indulge in a rich realistic colour and texture in a stylised animated way.

 I am always looking at ways other 3D artists have stylised and designed animal characters without making them too 'humanised'. Dreamworks has an abundance of inspiration for this throughout it's films over the years. I am currently working on building a lion character in 3D I previously posted on my blog. I don't want to get caught up in trying to achieve a high sense of realism here in form and texture.

Currently awaiting for the release of How To Train Your Dragon 2, which looks to be as beautiful in design and rich in story as the first, I am very exctied.

 

I definately encourage fans to go to schoolofdragons.com where members can creating their own viking character and raise a dragon to become the UDT! ultimate dragon trainer.

I also encourage everyone to check out the awesome trailers by clicking here.

Andrew Hickinbottom

Andrew Hickinbottom has to be one of my favourite 3D cgaracter modellers, with a distinct style throughout his work. Hickinbottom works with 3ds max, Mudbox, ZBrush, V-Ray, and Photoshop. Hickinbottom is renound for creating female / pin up characters, with stylised figures, soft and elegant character in a dynamic and interesting pose. Often he works to create one still image of a character in a scene or studio lighting set up allowing focus to one still composition a higher lever of detail and a high level of attention to detailing from one angle, this is one of the reasons I have always wanted to create such a set up. The indian female characer will be modeled in positon and can therefore be treated in a similar way. I have selected some of my favourite pieces by Andrew Hickinbottom, lots of these characters / portraits have been created in reference to fans and friends.

andrewhickinbottom.com/

Through his facebook page Hickinbottom is always keeping his fans up to date with current projects and their work in progress. November 2013's 3D World featured an article and interview on Andrew Hickinnbottom's 'Polygon Pin-ups' where he says the best advice to artists trying to break into the market is to stand out :

"Try to be original, to be unique and to do what you do well. Get a good online precesnce to get your self notices and be enthusiastic enough to do personal projects in free times, as you can truly express your skills and vision."


3D World November 2012 issue

Sculpting Rocks & Terrain in Z-Brush

Recently I have beeen experimenting with making rocks and rocky terrain in Z-Brush and Maya. As I have never created such an organic environment before I have felt a little out of my comfort zone, therefore I have watched and read many tutorials on making rocks & terrain quickly and effieciently. When researching this I have also come accross many terrain and rock generating programmes which look really effective and useful in making and environment quickly, however these being quite expensive and trial products not allowing a transferance to maya I havent been able to use them for any final product. i have however experimented with a few trials which I found really useful just to get an understanding of the level of detailing required to create a realistic terrain.
Instead I have opted to sculpt the rocks and terrain using Z-Brush, below are some of the earlier results I was getting. 

Blue Sky Studios

Recently Blue Sky Studios announced that Peanuts the movie would be released in 2015, alongside the trailer which can be found at YouTube. I was really impressed to see the trailer as having always being a Peanuts fan growing up, I was eager to see how the artists at Blue Sky had translated the 2D drawn characters into 3D models or even if this was possible to do successfuly and still retain the original artworks visual style. To be honest I was more than impressed it was like I had stepped into one of the old illustrations. The shapes and lines retain the qualities of the original artwork, however the beautiful lighting brings the environment and characters to life in a 3D way. I was a bit skepitical of the idea of Peanuts in a 3D visual style at first, howver from what I have seen so far it has been very successful. I look forward to seeing more teasers and trailers before the realease of the film in 2015.

Blue Sky Studios films have all made it into my top cg ainmated films from Ice Age to the more recent Rio 2 being released soon. I always find looking at the artwork for these films hugely inspirational and helpful when dealing with a creature desing. Both in the concept and 3D work their artwork retains a level of realism with a combination of cartoon stylisation. This juxtaposition creates really interesting and unique characters. The bird characters on Rio have to be some of my favourite character designs, their characters features are so strong each is an individualy strong character both personality visualy and mentaly. I am really looking forward to the release of Rio 2, having watched the first film again recently.

Pathfinder Progress

For the past month I have been working on the production of the interior environment of a space ship, to be used in the VFX film short 'PATHFINDER'. The interior being collaberatively buit along sid Zoe Lane and being directed by Dominic Pugh. We firstly blocked out the basic shapes and objects in the scene, slowly adding details, such as screws bolts and wires.
Having build all our listed assetts, all together we suddenly had an evironment. However it didn't look that busy our director therefore asked us to create more visual noise within the scene, by creating extra panels, hanging wires, pipes and pillars. To do this me and Zoe used different detailings from eachothes models to add details around the scene, by doing this we hoped to create a better visual flow and continuity throughout the design. After adding these extras into the environment it seemed more connected visualy throughout.

Then the unqrap.. :(
Working between Maya and RoadKill we unwrapped adn UV mapped the 400,000(aprox) poly environment. This took us longer than expected, causing us to fall behind and use some of texturing time. Once the scene was fully unwrapped and uv mapped the texturing process was able to begin.
To ensure that the textures of our seperate assets would coordinate together we decided to create a texture source pack, frm which we could texture the whole scene. This would ensure similar metals, colours and erosion. We also create a base metal texture that would be the primary metal throughout the scene.
Most of the scene has been textured with photoshop, however with some of the more organic materials in the scene such as the fabric on the back of the chairs I have used Z-brush to create the folds, tears, creases and fabric texture.

I then textured the rest of the metal on the chair in photoshop. I lost alot of the detailing in the creases and stitches when exproting my maps from Z-brush and will have to find a better method before the final rendering process begins. I want retain the high quality of the fabric as the backs of the chairs will be in alot of the shots in the Pathfinder short.

Above is the studio lighting set up I have created to render my turnarounds from. For the first time I am using a platform to display and turn the model on, I have done this as I have had lots of feedback in the past that models look lost on just the soft lit background, I've just never realy liked it. However by using the platform I've found it makes the model look more central in the scene throughout the whole 360 turn. Now that our models and textures were complete I now needed to begin rendering turnarounds, whilst Dominic and his VFX compositing team rendered and comped the necessary shots for the short. Below is a screen shot of the camera shot being lined up with the 3D scene in Maya.

These shots will be render and comped over roughly 2 months, compositors will add special effects such as lense flares, smoke and particles. Glows from the work station screens will also be added to the actors face, a test of this is shown below.

I look forward to updating the progress of this project in the near future until then alot of rendering needs to be done.