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INNOVATION

The Hottest trends changing the way you create 3D art MAKINGS

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Corey loving Hulk

Speedy

Eddy

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Gustavo Rios

O

ur cover image this issue was created by 3D maestro Gustavo Rios. Gustavo is a 3D generalist at creative studio Nuts Locomotyva in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He’s worked at the studio for three years, and has been studying 3D (along with programming) for six years.

Gustavo worked on ‘ Aim for the Stars’ in his space time, spending around eight days on the project in total. The character and other objects in the scene were modelled in 3ds Max and ZBrush The image background is part photo, part modelled in Vue. All in the separate elements were rendered in mental ray (using third-party shaders Zap skinplus and p_HairTK), then composited in photoshop.

To find out how Gustavo created the image, turn to page 20 for his scene-building masterclass using 3ds Max,ZBrush, Photoshop and Vue. gustavorios3d.blogspot.com

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Contents Issue 126 Januray 2013

Makings Portfolio:- Infocus Artist Gustavo Rios About • Concepts, Compositions and Wokflow • How to refine the faceand rig the Character • Redering in Grass and Rocket • Lightning • Also read on to discoverhow to create the issue’s cover

• Steps of Sketching and rendering • Power qualties of Characters like Therdurclap, Unlimited Strength and Accelerate Healing

Artist Edward flessing Romania About • Unique concept of making speedy Bike • Modelling of Bike in Zbrush without making any sketches

Say Cheese Eaddy Artist Lai Sweekin About • Modelling of Character in Zbrush • Texturing, Surfacing, Lightning and Rendering of Character • Learn entire process of making 3D Character in Softwares like Photoshop, Maya, 3ds Max and Zbrush.

Corey loving Hulk

Speddy

Artist James Schaf About • Preparation of Character • Blocking, Modelling of Character in Zbrush • Texturing, Lightning, Composition and Closing of Characerter from Sculpting

Zbrush Gallery

Artist Corey Loving About • Concepts • How artist get the Idea of loving Hulk

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Portfolio: In focus Gustavo Rios reveals how he created our inventive cover images, Aim for the stars

Artist Gustavo Rios Title Aim for the Stars Software 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop, Vue “I always wanted to make a ‘storytelling’ illustration, so when I had the idea for this image, I picked up a piece of paper and sketched right away, because ideas can go away as fast as they come!

“In 3D you have many ways of doing the same thing. Most of the techniques I explain in this tutorial are my personal way of working, so if you know an easier way or another method you prefer to use in any of the steps, feel free to use it!

“The most important thing when making a character-based scene such as this is to work on the personality and expression. I try to see characters like they’re two-dimensional, modelling and posing for the camera.

“Read on to discover how I created this issue’s cover image using 3ds Max, ZBrush, Photoshop and Vue...” gustavorios3d.blogspot.com

Stage 1

Concept, composition and workflow

the background models the character the scene 1 Plan 2 Sculpt 3 Build I took the rocket block I made earlier I made a base mesh in 3ds Max with all When making a scene I tend to make the

easier things first. It helps to keep myself motivated until the end of the project. So I made the blocking of objects and camera to study the composition and see the level of detail that each object would need. With the blocks I noticed that some of the rocket detail would have to be modelled after the boy was in the scene, because he would be on top of it, and interacting with it. That meant that it would be better if the boy was rigged too.

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and modelled the rocket with the usual box modelling techniques. I used planes with shell modifiers to give the rocket some thickness, and I used splines to model the cables and lines. I modelled the bear in ZBrush from ZSpheres.

the loops needed for sculpting. I sculpted the form and the details of the face and hands in ZBrush. The body and feet are covered by clothes and shoes, so there was no need to worry about details on these parts. To model the glasses, helmet, clothes and so on, I sent the boy body to 3ds Max, modelled the base mesh of the objects, then brought them back into ZBrush. In the beginning stages, the brushes I use the most are ClayBuild and Dam standard, to sculpt the main volumes.

When refining I use Pinch and Dam standard to make sharp contours, Clay and Inflate to refine the volumes, and Polish and Smooth to polish.

After the sculpting process, I painted the skin and eye maps in ZBrush using Polypaint. It works well when painting maps that don’t have too many details, so it’s good for cartoons. To make a good skin material, I painted the diffuse, subdermal and specular maps on a different layer. I used the SkinShade4 material to paint: it’s very bright so you can see the colours better, and the results are very similar to the render. Polish and Smooth to polish.

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Portfolio COMMUNITY

“

The most important thing when making a character-based scene such as this is to work on the personality and expression

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COMMUNITY Portfolio

4

Generate the textures

Before I could generate the textures, I had to do the UV mapping using UV Master in ZBrush. After that I generated the textures, then exported the model in a low subdivision and all the textures. Before the rigging I like to make the materials to correct any problems, and make sure the character will look good in the render. I used Mesh Smooth on the character skin to subdivide, and on the top of it I used a displacement modifier with the displacement map generated before. This modifier enables you to see the volumes and details in the viewport. For the skin material I used Zap’s skinplus shader from www.mentalraytips.blogspot.com.

Stage 2

Refine the face and rig the character

5 Sculpt the eyes

The boys eyes are composed of a totally transparent and very specular hemisphere.

6 Create the hair

I made the hair using splines with the Hair & Fur modifier applied to them. I created a straight line with a spline. In sub-object mode, I duplicated it several times to from a band of parallel stripes.I then applied the Hair & Fur modifier and positioned the splines on the character’s head.

I added points to the splines to model the shape as necessary. I also made tests to see if the hair looked good in high resoution, and adjusted the hair density and hair thickness.

the hair material 7 Create In the material editor, I picked the Mental Ray material. In the Surface

slot I used the p_HairTK shader, and on the Shadow slot I used p_HairTK_ shadow. In hair properties on the command panel I activated Apply mr shader in mr Parameters, and dragged the material to the slot. By default pJHairTK is configured blonde, so I changed the specular colours to get the results I wanted. Finally, in the Hair Rendering Options, I chose mr prim. www.3dworldmag.com

8

Rig the character

The rig for this character won’t be used for anything other than a one-off pose, because it isn’t meant for animation.

I used the CAT tools because they’re fast, powerful and easy to use, with a simple preset humanoid as a base, making sure I move the appropriate joints into position with my mesh, before I add a skin modifier to bind the elements together.

When you set the skin with the CAT rig, some parts of the character won’t deform correctly. That’s because you need to paint the skin weights. The trick is that you can paint the skin weights only to the pose you need.

It’s also worth working symmetrically.

Green and blue vertices mean that the symmetry was recognised; red vertices mean no symmetry was recognised.

The weights can be painted for this specific pose. You don’t need to worry about the mesh deforming oddly as it moves, seeing as it will never be animated. You can paint the weights on one side, then activate mirror mode >> again to copy to the other side.

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Stage 3

Portfolio COMMUNITY

The Grass and The Rocket

10

Make the grass

I used Hair & Fur to create the grass. In style mode, I did some variations with the Hair Brush and added some frizz and kink. The hair was rendered with the same techniques used for the boy’s hair, but set to have grass-like properties.

Grass doesn’t have very thin tips and it isn’t curvy like hair, so in the Hair & Fur modifier properties, I adjusted the Tip Thickness and Hair Segments values. Then, in Photoshop, I used some grass pictures to do the composition with the 3D render.

9

Simulate and render the clothes

I used simulation to make the cloth more realistic. I used the character mesh as the Collision Object, so it had to be optimised. First, I cloned the posed character, and attached all the modifiers (including Skin and Meshsmooth). I applied a Pro-optimizer modifier to the character mesh and changed Vertex until the mesh was optimised for the simulation. I added an Edit Poly modifier to delete polygons not needed for the simulation (hands, feet, neck). I used GoZ to send a low subdivision of the cloth (shirt and pants) to 3ds Max. I generated displacement maps to use later.

Before I started simulating, I needed to deform the cloth to the character pose. I selected the CAT Rig. In Command Panel > Motion tab, I clicked Setup/Animation Mode Toggle to turn off the layers and see the default pose. I selected the cloth, and added a Skin wrap modifier. That modifier attaches one mesh to another. I clicked Add and chose the character mesh, then I clicked Setup/Animation Mode Toggle, and the cloth followed the deformed mesh. I attached the Skin Wrap modifier.

Next, I applied a Cloth modifier to the cloth mesh. I clicked Add Objects and selected the character mesh I optimised.

Then I changed from Inactive to Collision Object. I needed some vertices of the cloth to stay static, and to do that I had to create a Group.

I selected the Group sub-object of the Cloth modifier, selected the vertices I wanted to freeze and clicked Make Group. I clicked Preserve, then in Cloth properties I activated Self Collision and Check Intersections. Finally, I clicked in Simulate Local.

I used the same process to make the pants, then exported displacement maps of the clothes to use in 3ds Max, using displacement modifier. I wanted the shirt to have ink splashes, so I mixed two materials using Blend material. In one material I used a texture of ink splashes and used the same map to make the mask and bump.

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Gustavo Rios made the grass using Hair & Fur with new properties

the rocket 11 Render To make the metallic material of the rocket, using Arch

& Design I set the material to dark grey, low diffuseness and very reflective. Some blur in the reflection helped to show the volumes and details. I used a map of scratches in the bump channel to make it more realistic. To simulate the fur on the bear, I used a Noise modifier combined with Meshsmooth to subdivide the mesh. A white falloff on the Diffuse channel helped to give the furry look.

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COMMUNITY Portfolio

Stage 4

Background and Lightining up the lighting 12 Set The scene is half day, half night, so to integrate

them better I placed the sun at the bottom left (like a sunset) and a big moon at the top right. I rendered a simple sky/sun/moon background in Vue, and in 3ds Max I recreated the same light conditions of the render made in Vue. (If you don’t have Vue you can use Terragen or even Photoshop.) The house in the background was curved on purpose to look like a cartoon.

I went to Create > Lights > Daylight System, and 3ds Max automatically created the sun and sky. It offered to activate exposure control automatically, and I chose No. I changed the sun properties to mr sun and mr sky. The sun was set to manual, and I positioned it looking through the camera to be in the same position as the sun in the Vue render.

I wasn’t using exposure control so I had to make a test render to see if the sky was too bright If so, you can reduce the sky intensity value until you can see some colours in the sky. Some sky portals helped to give the blue tones in the dark areas, and spots to draw contours of objects.

Gustavo used the camera to match the Vue lighting in 3ds max

and post-production 13 Rendering In Photoshop I merged the renders together, making

colour and tone corrections, and adding glow and bloom effects, some mountains in the background and some birds in the sky.

The grass is a mix of 3D and photos, so for the objects in contact with the ground I had to fix the integration with the grass, masking the base and drawing additional grass with the Standard Photoshop brush. Make sure the grass you paint has the same colour and tones as the original grass.

More examples of Gustavo Rio’s Work at www.gustavo3d.blogspot.com

If you would like to see your work in our Porfolio section. please send your images to: portfolio@3dworldmag.com

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Making of

Corey loving Hulk Artsit Corey loving Aim Hulk

F

Software Photoshop

irst of all I just want to thank CGArena for recog¬nizes us as an artist and giving us a chance/place to post work and creating an excellent resource for us to use. I hope you enjoy this walkthrough for one of Marvel’s most known characters, the incredible Hulk.

My name is Corey Loving; let’s begin.

THE IDEA

First I had an idea. The Hulk gets stronger, the an¬grier and he gets but what’s his limit?

In my mind I had the concept of him keeping the earth from being destroyed by trying to stop the moon from colliding with the earth using his strength alone. I visualized the picture in a vertical comic like fash¬ion. I don’t know why exactly like this but just how I imagined it.

FINAL PICTURE

In an effort to rid of a mass of enemies from earth Galactus expands the moon and sends it on a course to crush the earth in a blaze.

Prayers are heard from the people as they watch the sky light on fire. Some believe it is Revelations and embrace each other in their last moments of life.

But wait.what’s that on top of that building in the sky? The Hulk... Is he trying to stop the moon! I know the Hulk is strong but can he truly out strength an entire planet? Hulk our fates are in your hand. We believe in you, but Hulk how strong are you?

STEPS

1) So once I had the idea down I sketch it out in Photoshop using a normal round brush.

2) I added gray’s and tones.

3) I gathered a few references from the internet and detailed further.

4)Added light glows and dark glows by painting on a new layer set to Overlay.

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HULK Corey loving Making 5)

a. For coloring I created a new Overlay layer, and colored in the basic hues.

b. I also made a Color Dodge layer; choose very saturated red/orange col¬ors and gave the highlights that fire glow like feel.

6)

a. Created the final touches by creating a new Color Burn layer, picked a red/orange color and converted most of the white in the picture to orange. Just something more colorful than pure white is the point.

b. For the final touch I added fire debris from the moon just by creating a new Color Dodge layer and using a custom brush with Scatter set to 1000% in the brush properties. Then I just spray dots all over the place to add that extra detail the picture needs.

The entire picture took 3 days, and using the gray scale method and a little confidence in your ability you can really crank out artwork fast this way.

The Hulk is immune to all known Earth-based diseases, including AIDS. He can operate under intense conditions for extended periods of time due to his body not developing fatigue toxins quickly.

We all know that the Hulk could take Superman and Thor with his hands tied behind his back. We all know that the Hulk is the strongest person on Earth and beyond but he is a lot more than just strength. He has a multitude of powers and abilities:

Unlimited Strength

All the incarnations of the Hulk, except for the Grey Hulk, can lift approximately 100 tons when calm. The Grey Hulk starts off at approximately 75 tons. As the familiar old addage goes, “the Madder the Hulk gets, the Stronger he gets.”

During times of high stress or anger, an increase in adrenaline causes the Hulk’s strength to increase dramatically. There has never been a limit shown as to the highest strength the Hulk can reach thus it is assumed it is limitless.

The Hulk has shown many incredible feats of the years, including holding up a 150 billion ton mountain during the Secret Wars and breaking open Onslaught’s armor when the combined might of the rest of the world’s heroes couldn’t even make a scratch in it.

Thunderclap

The Hulk can slam his hands together to create a large thunderclap-type concussive force. He has imployed this for various reasons including creating a concussive blast to hurt enemies, to blow away gas or put out fires, or even deafen people.

Accelerated Healing

The Hulk has probably the quickest healing factor than anyone in the Marvel Universe, including Wolverine. Wounds that would be deadly to most other heroes takes just a short time for the Hulk to recover. During a battle with Vector, he repelled all of the skin off of the Hulk leaving just exposed flesh and muscle.

It took the Hulk minutes to regain the mass and be completely healed. During a battle with Speedfreek, he cut the Hulk’s stomach open with adamantium blades.

The Hulk had to hold his stomach to prevent his insides from spilling out. Within minutes the wound had healed, but unfortunately the skin had healed around part of the Hulk’s fingers. He had to rip his fingers out of his stomach and allow it to heal again. It should be noted that during the transformation from Bruce Banner to one of the various incarnations of the Hulk and back, he gains and loses large amounts of mass. The source of this mass is unknown. The amount of mass transfered is dependent on the incarnation, such as the Grey Hulk has much less mass than most of the other incarnation.

Thank you for looking at this tutorial. Thank you again CGArena for the opportunity. If anyone has any questions or would just like to talk email me anytime. Thank you!

Web: www.coeyloving.com Email: coreyarte@yahoo.com corey@coreyloving.com

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Making Corey loving HULK

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HULK Corey lloving Making

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Making Corey loving HULK

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Making of

Eddy

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Making EDDY

Artsit Lai Sweekim Aim Eddy

Software Maya, ZBrush

PREPARATION

I

started off with a collection of high resolution photographs of the person I am going to model. This is important as I will be using camera projection method on this project. By having a good front, side, quarter and other views in raw format would be a great start.

First of all, the raw format photographs would provide focal length info which will be useful for matching up the model with various camera views. Also, we could rely on the extra info on the raw images to remove shadow and highlight on the photographs for hi res texture projections. I would explain in details at the later stage on how I do this. So, it would be good if you happen to have these hi res photographs ready.

The entire process will use Maya for Modeling and Hair. Photoshop and Bodypaint for Texturing, ZBrush for sculpting and Renderman for Maya for final render. One little part that is different from my other projects is that, I wanted to achieve the final look without depending on comping the different render passes together.

I must admit I did do a bit of color grading and adding a bit of film noise to better blend with the actual back¬ground image, but no render passes were used in the final image.

MODELING

optimizing the model. As I will be having a rather close up on the final image. Be very faithful to the actual photograph references and you will notice human face is never symmetrical.

I used UVLayout pro for UV creation. The UV tool in Maya could also do the job rather easily especially us¬ing the later version of Maya. If you look at the way I layout my UV, I had nose and lips cut off as separate UV pieces. The reason for that is most of the time you won’t get enough space for details in this area, es¬pecially at the tip of the nose when you have to compromise yourself when trying to squeeze in everything into one UV piece.

To begin, I imported a generic head model into Maya. I have five photos of the person I am going to model in left, quarter left, front, quarter right and right views. Create five cameras and attached these photos as camera background images. It would be a good idea to make these photos in square size to avoid any ac¬cidental scaling.

You will have to reshape the model, at the same time adjusting the cameras to match the head model. This process usually ended up with lots of frustration as you will most likely not being able to get perfect alignment. Well, one of the reasons is the actual human model might move or changes his expression slightly from one photo to another. So, you will have to decide from an artistic point of view to choose which will be the master view to follow. For me, I had a pretty good matching up on front and quarter views. Having bit of a trouble getting the ears right.

We will reuse the camera setup in Maya for texture projection inside Bodypaint.

Before you begin adjusting cameras, please read my other tutorial on how to do camera setup in Maya so that it is transferable to Bodypaint. The link of the tutorial is at: http://www.sweekim.com/ Tut_MatchingCamera1.html

Once you have got matching up done, the next step would be the actual model¬ing works. It really depends on the quality of the generic head model you have. You could reuse some of the area but for me, I prefer to start from scratch, using the generic head model only as a guide. I started off with modeling the eyes, nose, mouth and ears as separate pieces. I wanted to not worry so much of how I am going to join them together, but focusing more onto the flow of the facial muscle, getting the topology right. Once you are satisfied, you can begin joining the pieces together, at the same time carefully

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EDDY Making

TEXTURING

This step requires cleaning up of the photographs you will be projecting onto the head model. Basically, its a process of removing shadow and highlight. There are many ways you can achieve that.

My practice would be using Adobe Bridge Camera Raw editor to quickly flatten the shadow and highlight as much as possible. Make a preset of the settings and apply that to the rest of the photographs.

Load the photograph into Pho¬toshop for further manual flattening.

Remember, there wouldn’t be a way to flatten all area. You will need to regionally removing the shadow and highlight as much as you can.

Once you have finish cleaning up the photographs, you can begin loading the cameras into Bodypaint and start projection. I have written a tutorial on how projection works inside Bodypaint at: http://www.sweekim. com/Tut_ProjectionTexturingPg1.html www.3dworldmag.com

Well, if you have followed closely till this step you will notice that I am relying heavily on the photographs to provide me modeling and texturing information. By the way, I am using 4k resolution on all my textures as any higher resolution might be pushing my system too far and slowing me down.

Next, I will begin sculpting inside ZBrush using the color texture created as a base for using it as alpha for creating the skin displacement. It is always a good idea to add layers inside ZBrush for various part of sculpt¬ing, such as wrinkle layer, skin displacement layer and etc. I choose 16 bit TIF for my displacement map format.

You can of course choose 32 bit TIF but that would mean more constraint in editing the image inside Photoshop. I wouldn’t go too much into details on how I did the sculpting inside ZBrush as I guess it wouldn’t be any different than most of the tutorials out there. >> January 2014

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Making EDDY

HAIR

cutting down the scattering strength to half.

I

received few emails on how I made those hairs.

To be honest, not a lot of works or efforts were put into creating the hair. Maya Hair by itself did a pretty good job.

Since I won’t be doing any dynamic simulation on the hair, it made the process half easier. So, with that in mind, I set the Simulation Method to be Static. Also, I have adjusted Clump settings and other settings to create as much randomness as I can.

One little useful setting would be Start Curve At¬tract. I normally set it to 1 so that it will fully follow the underlying curve.http://www.sweekim.com/Mel_ zinJointCurve.html I should have mentioned this ear¬lier. When creating the Hair system, set the Output to Paint Effects and NURBS curves. The Paint Effects would be where you set the color and get render out.

The eye brows were done by Maya Hair too. I am hoping to write a more in depth step by step tutorial on how to create CG hair in near future.

LOOKDEV AND SURFACING

This is the first time I use Ren- derman to do lookdev and I am not entirely sure if I did it right in the Renderman SSS settings. The main reason I choose to use Renderman over Mental Ray is the speed.

The final render takes only 8 minutes comparing to 15 to 20 minutes on a similar render using Mental Ray. I guess this So, let’s start with creating a basic blinn material and add Subsurface Scattering to it.

For the scattering strength, I set it to 10. Under Scattering Albedo, which basically is where you could attach a map to decide the area you want to have more or less scattering, i.e. white refers to have full scattering and black to have none. I painted a 50% gray map,

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Then I painted near white onto the area I want more scattering, such as ears, lips and tip of the nose.

Also, painted near black onto will kick start another heated debate over which is the better renderer but this is just my little opinion.

Also, I am hoping to hear feedback on the mistake that I may have made in SSS settings from the more experience Renderman for Maya users.

The where you want less SSS effects. As for the Scattering Entry and Exit Tint. I attached a same color map to further control the scattering color, such as a more saturated red onto the ears area. Setting a value of 5 for Scattering Free Path, a value for how far the scattering will travel and finally a value of 10 for Scattering Filter value, which will be used to blur the scattering map? I have also added a map to con¬trol Translucence value on the blinn material. It’s a map to control where you needed more translucency. I have also added facing ratio node to give a little difference in color on the surface facing away from camera. Just wanna to give more color variations to the final render.

Finally, you might want to reduce the Diffuse value to something like 0.35 to allow more scattering to show up onto the final render.

LIGHTING AND RENDERING

I

created a Renderman Environment Light sphere and assigned a HDRI map as an ambient light setup also serving a reflection environment for the eyes. Instead of using the default occlusion for Shadowing, I chose Color Bleeding which I find the result seems to be much softer for human skin. Next, I did a bit of search onto portrait photography and found one with the lighting that I like and started placing lights to follow the reference image. For the final rendering quality, I set 0.5 for Shading Rate and a high value of 12

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EDDY Making to Pixel Samples as there would be camera depth of field in the final render. I have tested all filters and decided Blackman-Harris seemed to work best for my render. Also, remember to turn on Sigma Hiding to have good result on hair ren¬dering. Usually you will be tweaking both the lookdev and lighting at the same time to achieve the look.

Render- man does allow you to cache the SSS, Render Radios- ity (EnvLight) and shadows separately. Also, you could set the cache mode to Per Job, so that it can reuse the same cache for the en¬tire turntable renders. I had the first frame rendered at 8 minutes and subsequent at 4 minutes reusing the cache done earlier.

Hope that you find this tuto¬rial useful and there is still so much for me to continue learning. Please email me if you have anything to share with me or you need further explanation. Please visit my website for my other works and tutorials.

Web: www.sweekim.com

Email: sweekimlai@yahoo.com

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Making of

Speedy

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SPEEDY Making

Artsit Edward Fleissig Romania Aim Speedy Software ZBrush

CONCEPT

I’ve created this work for a local CG contest that had “Speed” as theme. I’ve started the project directly in ZBrush 4, without having a very clear vision about how the subject will look like and without making any sketches.

The only thing I had in mind when I started the modeling was that I’ve wanted to create a very elongated vehicle that should have a very small distance between ground and motorcycle and the pilot should be connected with the machine through many cables and devices. The First sketch of the project wasthis one.

For the pilot I used a base mesh from ZBrush that I’ve placed on the motorbike, making a rough modeling of it; as for the motorcycle, I’ve modeled it from scratch, using zsketches.

In this phase of the modeling, I didn’t intend to create well defined shapes; my main purpose was to find so¬lutions regarding the conceptual aspect. In the follow¬ing sketch I make some concept tests.

After these phases in which I worked mainly at the concept part for clarifying the direction that I want to fol¬low, I started to focus more

For the modeling, I mainly used the following brushes: clay tubes, move tool, smooth, smooth stronger, hPolish.

After I corrected the modeling I begun also some coloring and texturing tests, to visualize better the direction I want to follow regarding the texturing.

At this point, after all the tests I’ve made, I finally had a clear image about the way the final work will look like. As for the texturing, after the coloring tests, I realized that the motorcycle would look great if it would be composed from different color and texture variations. For making this thing possible, I decided to create for each color part a subtool. The idea was to create a mask map that would help me in Photoshop to control all the render passes. The final modeling stage of the motorcycle was on next page.

you draw a mask above the surface you choose and you extract a surface with a variable thickness. The mask map I obtained by coloring in ZBrush each subtool with different colors, using a flat material, for composing later in the rendering phase, different parts of the model with different colors and textures.

After I created the mask layer, I could go further on preparing the render passes for rendering part. For this, I rendered in ZBrush more images with the motorcycle using different materials. I also used the new ZBrush 4 function, the BRP render, and I created through with a single click mask layer, ambient occlusion pass, shadow pass.

These are the render passes that I make:

>>

All these subtools were created using the extract mesh function;

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Making SPEEDY

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SPEEDY Making The rendering process was a non-linear one, because there were many changes and modifications during the working process. I consider that the rendering process is a very creative one, similar with the modeling, and the entire concept can be drastically changed in this phase. I begun with red color render pass and then, step by step, I added new materials taken from other passes.

After this phase I began to add the final details for the motorcycle and the pilot such as: tattoos, in-scriptions, decorations. All these were made in Photoshop by adding those using different textures, with blend modes.

This is the final render of the motorcycle:

After I finalized the motorcycle rendering, I started to compose the final image. I wanted to create a view that would suggest speed and dynamism, and the best way to suggest that was to think of a motorcycle competition. I decided to add two more rivals in background that I ‘ve created using two different renderings with other materials, colors, inscriptions, and other pilots. The background was created by applying a motion blur effect on an organic texture.

For the lower part of the composition I use a texture which I modified it in such a way that should suggest a dynamism feeling, like the background.

After I composed the final image, I’ve added some special effects that were meant to increase the dynamism: sparks, flames and smoke. I used for these elements some photos that I’ve added to the image, using screen blend mode in Photoshop. The last adjustments were general settings for the color, brightness and contrast, and adding the sharpen filter. That’s all. I hope the information you found in this tutorial was helpful. Thanks for reading!

Email: fleissigmosaic@yahoo.com

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Making of

Say Cheese

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Making SAY CHEESE

Artsit James Schaf Aim Say Cheese Software Maya,ZBrush

PROJECT

“Say Cheese” is the first of five projects that I created for my final term at the Gnomon School of Visual Ef¬fects. The class was Creature Construction, taught by Alex Alvarez. We were given two weeks to go from finding a concept to presenting a work as close to production quality as possible. The first week was dedi¬cated to modeling/sculpting, and the second week was for texturing, lighting and rendering. This was in addition to the rest of my classes and working. Needless to say it was intense, but worth every minute. As they say, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

CONCEPT

My search for a concept lead me to the very talented artist Kai Spannuth’s website . As soon as I saw the concept,I knew that was the one. It reminded me of a mix of Star Wars and the Last Star Fighter, both being favorite movies of my childhood.

PREPARATION

My objective was to make the final product look believable and, most importantly, a very strong likeness to the con-cept. First off, I found it easy to rotate the image, so it was more of a straight on camera shot. I then selected the per-spective camera and imported the concept in as an image plane. After a very basic blocking out of the character’s head, I started concentrating matching the Maya camera to the point of view in the concept. I feel this is the foundation of the project. . I liked using the X-ray display to do this, which you’ll see me using quite a bit. Upon get¬ting the camera in position, I chose to set a key frame. Doing this would always give me a very quick way of getting back to that set camera view. Another option is to lock the attributes of the camera, so that you don’t accidently

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BLOCKING

I

found out that the easiest way of blocking out the anatomy was to start with the eyes and building from there. Especially being that since this is a humanoid type creature, I felt the structure of the anatomy was going to be fairly easy. I wanted to concentrate on the major edge loops that you would when model¬ing any character, loops around the eyes and mouth. . I knew I was go¬ing be using Zbrush, but I always like having a very solid Basemesh before moving forward with sculpt¬ing. However, I knew Retopology was going to be unavoidable, so I kept the ears very simple.

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SAY CHEESE Making

I knew from the start that the outfit would be primarily done in Maya, with some minor sculpting in Zbrush. All these parts were very straight forward. The challenge here was to put them in correct 3D space. In doing this, it also helped me solidify the overall thickness and form of the torso section.

SCULPTING

Now, to do the basic set up as I did in Maya, using an image plane and matching the camera angle.

I think this is something to make note of.

Here is a quick run through. By the way, this works in Zbrush 3.5 and not the workflow for Zbrush 4.

Go to Texture/Image Plane/ Load Image. This will bring your image into the background.

Load Tool into scene and try to match view of model to the concept. To make this amazingly easier, you need to be able to see through your model.

Texture/ Image Plane/ Model Opacity/ decrease to your liking.

Now to be able to lock the camera.

Document/ ZAppLink Properties/ Custl. This will save that camera view, so that you can snap back

I liked sculpting with perspective on, which seems to be a great discussion topic for us creative nerds.

After getting a sculpt that I felt was good enough for the time that was allowed, it was time for Re¬topology. I chose to do retoping in Zbrush, not much more to say about that. Then it was time for the final detailing and adding things such as wrinkles and skin texture.

LIGHTING

Once again I had to study the concept. Being that it is an artist www.3dworldmag.com

concept the lighting can be something that is very difficult to match.

Something that I focused on when trying to replicate the lighting was the specular hit on the eyes (this should be a dead giveaway where the key lights are located). The remainder of the lights I chose to focus on was the blue colored lights coming from the bottom. In the end, I used 2 spotlights and 3 directional lights. My program of choice is UVLayout, it is very quick and easy. Cut seams where you want them, relax, pack UVs and you’re finished. To match the lighting of the concept, I used Decay on most of the lights. This gave the ability to concentrate the light¬ing where I wanted it. This portion >> January 2014

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of the project required a lot of attention, tweaking, and numerous test renders. Last note on lighting, I was adjusting the lighting throughout the rest of the project, even up to the final render.

Making SAY CHEESE

TEXTURING

I first apply a material to all the pieces that make up the finished model. Then it is time for research, this is the part I really enjoy.

I chose to break it down to four categories: 1) Anatomy 2) Leathers 3) Metals 4) Plastics

Here are a couple references I pulled from the web that I felt were similar to the materials I wanted to create for the final renÂŹder.

I wanted to use subsurface scat-tering for the skin, which can end up looking waxy. I personally found this challenging, but fun.

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SAY CHEESE Making

COMPOSITING

After rendering out the above renders, it was time to make the magic happen and combine them into pleas¬ing final image.

For the background, I wanted to recreate the same painterly backdrop; however, I did want to add a bit more punch of color. I then analyzed the concept and felt it was necessary to do some minor touch ups in Photo¬shop. This resulted in the completed image.

CLOSING

lighting, and texturing I didn’t want to bore anyone with too much reading. If you do have specific question or would like me to expand on anything, please fill free to contact me.

Before I close, I would like to thank God for blessing me with this talent. I would also like to thank my wife for being supportive and understanding about the countless hours of sitting in front of my computer. Last, but not least, I would like to thank all of those who have passed their knowledge on to me, which is my goal to continue passing it on.

I went over most of my process rather quickly, mainly, concentrating on what I felt where key points. Some of these are very basic and others, I hope, are new ideas for you. I would have liked to go more in depth, be¬ing that I’ve touched on blocking, sculpting, UV mapping, www.3dworldmag.com

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Making SAY CHEESE

Keep learning, creating, and sharing!

Email: jamesschauf@sbcglobal.net

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