mann, so much great work! spent the last hour going thru this thread again.
gotta ask, how did you do the chain-mail around his head? and the bake for it too? did it lag at all?
i know if i even attempted that much geometry my computer would probably blow up
yes the polycount was definitely an issue, not so much for the renderer, i dunno where the limit for the scanliner is, my biggest mesh i baked without probles was 30mio quads.
But max gets slow and sluggish with a lot of objects and i had to be able to tweak them in viewport and not only be able to have them in renderer.
At first i tried it with a very lowpoly torus like this
and created a whole bunch of them to test the performance, well it got sluggish so i had to find a simpler way to create good believable Rings
So i tried it with the lowest poly ring i could think of, this:
together with a shell modifier and a turbosmooth it would give a decent ring i thought...
well i was wrong
its edgy not really smooth so i had to go a bit higher in polycount to make it a believable maille ring
this was the best and lightest shape
with shell and turbosmooth its good enough
So next step was to create a tileable piece for the chainmail itself, there are dozens of maille patterns which are different to read, i decided to go with the most simple pattern i could find as it is the best to read from far, the more complex patters just got noisy in all my tests, and damn there are complex patterns...
So what you do is this:
then do it in the other direction
which together with shell and turbosmooth gives you this
a tilable pice which can easily expanded
as you see its already wuite polyheavy but because of me working with the stack, i could just turn off the shell and the turbosmooth and ended up with less polygons to handle
So the next thing i did was modeland sculpt a rough version of his chainmail hood with the wrinkles i thought it would have
i also unwrapped it, so i could unfold it with a tool called slideknit, most of you might already know it, some might not, MoP did a maya conversion and i think you can do similar things with RenderHJS TexTools
You can find it here http://slidelondon.com/ in the Tools Section
So what it does with the unwrap is this
flatten it to a plane and you then are able to morph between the flat shape and the round one.
The next step would be to place a large tilable maille pattern on it, i don't have this stuff any more and i don't want to reproduce it, but its just placing the pattern you want onto the flattened surface and then skinwrap it to the morpher object, so if you animate the morpher it moves acordingly, also i created several pieces as the design had an overlapping part and then removed some rings here and there. And also fixed the seams by hand, with placing only a few rings by hand, whih also gave a bit more of a handmade look
Which brought me this
the bit of stretching here and there is due to the unwrap, which could be fixed, but as it it under his shirt, i didn't care tooooo much
About the baking part, well thats pretty straight forward, works the same as floaters or anything else just fine
Will do another qick tutorial on the padded armor, as this has been asked on zbrushcentral, but not now
ahh, so that's how its done.. yeah because i always wondered how to do it efficiently in maya. placing the pattern by hand seemed like a waste of time and you would have to be crazy to do it one by one.
really nice vid, interesting technique, very nicely done sir. thanks for the wires shot very nice work again. tried out your mail technique last night with mop's slide knit and it worked like a charm. good resource thanks for the heads up again!
@crazyfool: its somewhat hard to say, the video was captured with 12FPS and playback is at 60 which is 5times faster but zbrush doesn't capture every action, so i doubt i only worked like 100 minutes on it xD i think its something around 6-8hrs spread over several evenings. but its really hard to say on airborn i don't stop the times i use to create stuff as money isn't what counts on em
@skayne: really that'd be super boring, i use like 4 brushes, claytubes for pretty much every form creation, standard with a super fine alpha for wrinkles and such finde details, polish (in 3.1 i used flatten for this instead) for flattening areas and smooth for blending the rough blockouts into each other. Its really not that interesting as i use only so few brushes with sometimes switching alphas, but not very often.
skayne: these days i use trim dynamic alot its behaviour is also pretty cool for flattening out parts
this year i had a lot of under NDA projects for film and TV, games somewhat died out over here, a lot of companies closed or switched over to browser games, so it was a pretty interesting year for me, changing workflows, thinking in other ways, a lot of changes here and there, going from udk to unity, which was a really nice step for me, well yeah- stop mumbling, start pimping, here a few images i can show from the last few months
some people might know most of it already, i just want to keep this thread updated
something i did as a salute to the great chris sanders, he contacted me a few weeks after i did it, possibly it will get a bit more attention in the next months
started working on warsoup, this little fella got canned right after i did him though, but will be a fun production and also interesting challenge for the upcoming year
i guess a lot of people already saw this, eventually i'll find the time to finish him, maybe even pose him a bit, but right now my schedule is too stuffed for any personal projects
something i started but never found the time work further on, and i hate rendering it takes so friggin long, and there are not even any textures/bumps applied yet, oh well another started and not finished personal project this year. Feels a bit like i only did personal stuff this year :O but i worked quite a lot but most stuff isn't ready for the public yet
and yet another personal project, and this time finished, well as said before not too happy with it, but doesn't matter i already removed all the work in progress data from my hard disk, don't want to open her anymore - but eventualy i'll do a sdk with her like i did with the sheep, but then i'll need to tweak the stuff that i didn't find the time while comicon as my dad went to hospital, and is even yet not released from it, after 4 very heavy surgeries :X
oh cool comething work related i can show already a small elf for a christmas ad from the tv station SKY, i recieved a very rough concept and from that on did a design of my own, it got changed entirely by the agency i was working for and then switched back to my initial design attempt, yay
So what else did i do? well yeah, digging into unity and javascript, testing stuff for airborn, apperently i did some supervision and consulting jobs this year as well, somewhat cool to get paid for stuff i do anyways on forums, bitch about other peoples work, rip it apart and let them do it again, haha ^^
And well tvseries and film stuff, will show it once i'm allowed to, but the show i worked on for over 6 months was the most requested on MIPcom, whichrather surprised any of us - well no one of us knew mipcom before that but its some huge entertainment expo in Cannes so i guess its somewhat of a cool trophy for our hard work.
And i have to say, environment is just not my thing, i can do it for a while and its fun but after doing THOUSANDS of roots, it starts to stink - i'm happy that i'm back on characters now
well yeah thats it, i doubt i'll have any more updates this year, so have a nice christmas, new years eve, a good time, to adam a good hand and thanks for watching
That Chris Sanders tribute is still one of my favourite pieces of CG I've seen for a long time... so much character in that erm.... character!
Looking forward to seeing what happens with Warsoup too, and the stuff you create with it.
I don't commonly see much in the way of 'Style' in character art these days, there's so much 'Generic Male Combat Expert A' but you've definitely got a recognisable style, and that's awesome.
well after lots of good news and him looking fitter, since yesterday we know chemical treatment will start soon, yay :X
@haikai: from time to time i do little things in engines not only for presentation, for presentation i usually render in max, only a couple of times i did it in unreal, its just a too slow process for me - but no i was primarily talking about airborn, its not entirely decided yet but looks like we all like unity and its easier to get into and we are not as code dependent as with unreal.
Also i used it for little apps for a director i worked with on a last project, so he can fly through the current sets, play with the fov and tilt of the cam, takes a screenshot for the storyboarders and the animators later will have all the camera information so its easy to reproduce.
Replies
gotta ask, how did you do the chain-mail around his head? and the bake for it too? did it lag at all?
i know if i even attempted that much geometry my computer would probably blow up
yes the polycount was definitely an issue, not so much for the renderer, i dunno where the limit for the scanliner is, my biggest mesh i baked without probles was 30mio quads.
But max gets slow and sluggish with a lot of objects and i had to be able to tweak them in viewport and not only be able to have them in renderer.
At first i tried it with a very lowpoly torus like this
and created a whole bunch of them to test the performance, well it got sluggish so i had to find a simpler way to create good believable Rings
So i tried it with the lowest poly ring i could think of, this:
together with a shell modifier and a turbosmooth it would give a decent ring i thought...
well i was wrong
its edgy not really smooth so i had to go a bit higher in polycount to make it a believable maille ring
this was the best and lightest shape
with shell and turbosmooth its good enough
So next step was to create a tileable piece for the chainmail itself, there are dozens of maille patterns which are different to read, i decided to go with the most simple pattern i could find as it is the best to read from far, the more complex patters just got noisy in all my tests, and damn there are complex patterns...
So what you do is this:
then do it in the other direction
which together with shell and turbosmooth gives you this
a tilable pice which can easily expanded
as you see its already wuite polyheavy but because of me working with the stack, i could just turn off the shell and the turbosmooth and ended up with less polygons to handle
So the next thing i did was modeland sculpt a rough version of his chainmail hood with the wrinkles i thought it would have
i also unwrapped it, so i could unfold it with a tool called slideknit, most of you might already know it, some might not, MoP did a maya conversion and i think you can do similar things with RenderHJS TexTools
You can find it here http://slidelondon.com/ in the Tools Section
So what it does with the unwrap is this
flatten it to a plane and you then are able to morph between the flat shape and the round one.
The next step would be to place a large tilable maille pattern on it, i don't have this stuff any more and i don't want to reproduce it, but its just placing the pattern you want onto the flattened surface and then skinwrap it to the morpher object, so if you animate the morpher it moves acordingly, also i created several pieces as the design had an overlapping part and then removed some rings here and there. And also fixed the seams by hand, with placing only a few rings by hand, whih also gave a bit more of a handmade look
Which brought me this
the bit of stretching here and there is due to the unwrap, which could be fixed, but as it it under his shirt, i didn't care tooooo much
About the baking part, well thats pretty straight forward, works the same as floaters or anything else just fine
Will do another qick tutorial on the padded armor, as this has been asked on zbrushcentral, but not now
im have to download that script by Mop for maya.
thanks for the very detailed tutorial!
I just tried Slideknit, and easy/fast to have good result. great!
Thanks Neox!
ha I work with the guys at slide london sometimes as a freelancer.
thanks guys!
woog: will see if i can find a wireshot, if not produce one...
:edit: ok found one shot of the head
ok here is something a bit older for airborn, i wanted to put some music under it but well its kinda hard to find a 20minutes uptempo song
so here is the making of Garrido, the looney Airborn lighthousekeeper - 20 minutes and already timelapsed, the full sculpting process.
http://vimeo.com/10109514
is there a way to bind vimeo videos into the boards?
the embedd code doesn't seem to work
Really fun to see you sculpt cloth, you make it look like its easy!
that knight is friggin sweet.
@crazyfool: its somewhat hard to say, the video was captured with 12FPS and playback is at 60 which is 5times faster but zbrush doesn't capture every action, so i doubt i only worked like 100 minutes on it xD i think its something around 6-8hrs spread over several evenings. but its really hard to say on airborn i don't stop the times i use to create stuff as money isn't what counts on em
@skayne: really that'd be super boring, i use like 4 brushes, claytubes for pretty much every form creation, standard with a super fine alpha for wrinkles and such finde details, polish (in 3.1 i used flatten for this instead) for flattening areas and smooth for blending the rough blockouts into each other. Its really not that interesting as i use only so few brushes with sometimes switching alphas, but not very often.
thank for the vid, I really dig how clean and effiecient you work! I had lots of fun watching.
Keep Rocking!
skayne: these days i use trim dynamic alot its behaviour is also pretty cool for flattening out parts
this year i had a lot of under NDA projects for film and TV, games somewhat died out over here, a lot of companies closed or switched over to browser games, so it was a pretty interesting year for me, changing workflows, thinking in other ways, a lot of changes here and there, going from udk to unity, which was a really nice step for me, well yeah- stop mumbling, start pimping, here a few images i can show from the last few months
some people might know most of it already, i just want to keep this thread updated
something i did as a salute to the great chris sanders, he contacted me a few weeks after i did it, possibly it will get a bit more attention in the next months
started working on warsoup, this little fella got canned right after i did him though, but will be a fun production and also interesting challenge for the upcoming year
i guess a lot of people already saw this, eventually i'll find the time to finish him, maybe even pose him a bit, but right now my schedule is too stuffed for any personal projects
something i started but never found the time work further on, and i hate rendering it takes so friggin long, and there are not even any textures/bumps applied yet, oh well another started and not finished personal project this year. Feels a bit like i only did personal stuff this year :O but i worked quite a lot but most stuff isn't ready for the public yet
and yet another personal project, and this time finished, well as said before not too happy with it, but doesn't matter i already removed all the work in progress data from my hard disk, don't want to open her anymore - but eventualy i'll do a sdk with her like i did with the sheep, but then i'll need to tweak the stuff that i didn't find the time while comicon as my dad went to hospital, and is even yet not released from it, after 4 very heavy surgeries :X
oh cool comething work related i can show already a small elf for a christmas ad from the tv station SKY, i recieved a very rough concept and from that on did a design of my own, it got changed entirely by the agency i was working for and then switched back to my initial design attempt, yay
So what else did i do? well yeah, digging into unity and javascript, testing stuff for airborn, apperently i did some supervision and consulting jobs this year as well, somewhat cool to get paid for stuff i do anyways on forums, bitch about other peoples work, rip it apart and let them do it again, haha ^^
And well tvseries and film stuff, will show it once i'm allowed to, but the show i worked on for over 6 months was the most requested on MIPcom, whichrather surprised any of us - well no one of us knew mipcom before that but its some huge entertainment expo in Cannes so i guess its somewhat of a cool trophy for our hard work.
And i have to say, environment is just not my thing, i can do it for a while and its fun but after doing THOUSANDS of roots, it starts to stink - i'm happy that i'm back on characters now
well yeah thats it, i doubt i'll have any more updates this year, so have a nice christmas, new years eve, a good time, to adam a good hand and thanks for watching
That Chris Sanders tribute is still one of my favourite pieces of CG I've seen for a long time... so much character in that erm.... character!
Looking forward to seeing what happens with Warsoup too, and the stuff you create with it.
I don't commonly see much in the way of 'Style' in character art these days, there's so much 'Generic Male Combat Expert A' but you've definitely got a recognisable style, and that's awesome.
Merry Christmas to you too man!
When you say you went from UDK to Unity do you mean for presentation purposes? Do you usually do more than just modeling/texturing for your clients?
By the way, I hope your father will be okay. Have a safe and happy holidays.
@haikai: from time to time i do little things in engines not only for presentation, for presentation i usually render in max, only a couple of times i did it in unreal, its just a too slow process for me - but no i was primarily talking about airborn, its not entirely decided yet but looks like we all like unity and its easier to get into and we are not as code dependent as with unreal.
Also i used it for little apps for a director i worked with on a last project, so he can fly through the current sets, play with the fov and tilt of the cam, takes a screenshot for the storyboarders and the animators later will have all the camera information so its easy to reproduce.