#anm230

Found it. At the time of making the storyboards and the animatic, the character designs were still in development so I had to keep things rough. That and literally spent 3 weeks on it trying to get the timing right and then making like hundreds of changes from feedback from my group and lecturer.

So this is my group work’s final animation for this trimester. Organisation wasn’t the best and we got really behind fast so it was a rush to meet deadlines. That plus 3 3D kids and 3 2D kids working on a full 3D thing didn’t go well. Told them not to put me on animation and of course they did :( Still got out of it though so my sanity is still here.

LO08 For several years now I have enjoyed reading comic books and drawing concepts for my own characters while in all honesty, I am very casual when it comes to playing video games. However, the rendering and art style of the Borderlands series has drawn my attention for its very comic book feel. Borderlands was first released in 2007 by Gearbox Software and 2K Games and runs on a modified Unreal Engine. Since its first release it has seen a sequel and a presequel. By having the illusion of being cell-shaded it gives the world a comic book feel, and allows more stylised characters and environments. For my own work I would like to draw ideas from Borderlands and maybe create characters or a world (or one day both) where it would maintain a more comic book appearance design wise. http://borderlandsthegame.com/

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/09/borderlands-decides-on-cel-shaded-art-style/

http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Borderlands

http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/26825/how-animations-like-this-are-done-3d-artistic-cartoonish

Evaluate contemporary practices in a chosen specialization and use this information to shape and develop your own practice. This my first attempt to use particle system. I watched the tutorial from digital tutor called ‘Introduction to Particle Flow in 3ds Max ‘to create the smoke and fire effect. What I have learned from this tutorial-I learned how to create the smoke and different shapes particle with muti-colour. I also played a bit the setting on marterial panel.

For our small group project with Karen and Meg. I used the same method I had learned from the particle tutorial from digital tutors to make the spell effect for Karen’s Dr. Witch. Unfortunately, due to the time limit, we could not finish whole scene, I only applied my spell effect to the first 80 frames. The other contribution I did for this group was I quickly built up the environment with assets I created on previous trimester for the battle scene. I had watched the tutorial to create the smash effect for Meg, but I could not finish on time. I really felt bad and sorry, I actually would like to contribute more to this small group.

New technology I have discovered

One day our classmate, Nathaniel was asking for help with how to make the object become one piece in the Facebook group. I gave him a suggestion by using Boolean, thought Nathaniel said he still has trouble on using VoroFrag on his building for final project. But, at least I know the new method to fragment a solid object via VoroFrag.I would like to try it during the spare time.

Another thing I would like to mention is I had found a advanced crash effect tutorial from Allan McKay, a VFX Supervisor & Technical Director, this tutorial teach you how to Create advanced shaders, Rendering techniques, Compositing, Dynamics by Using Industry Standard Tools - Thinking Particles 6, FumeFX 3.5, V-Ray, X-Mesh and 3DS Max.I also shared this information to Amy and Azam  also Tumblr members, who might interested with this. I would spend my holiday to try to follow the tutorial to do practice.

  Reference:

Kinney,J.(n.d.). Introduction to Particle Flow in 3ds Max .Retrieved from http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/525-Introduction-to-Particle-Flow-in-3ds-Max.

For the  efficient group project, I was assigned to make a research making a moodboard so other members can easily and quickly get idea for pre-production process. The moodboard not just only benefited myself also enabled our team member Azam to build his scene quickly.

The second task I was assigned to develop the hotel scenes and virtual bank scene for other member to use. The hotel scene included hotel lobby, stair, corridor and room. I started from searching some hotel images on website then I ended up with a classic style. I started from lobby then quick duplicated some assets such as paintings, walls, plants, tables and also sofa to create corridor and room scenes. The most challenged section for those scene were lighting and rendering.

There were various issue caused when I did rendering. The render result did not match what it presented on my screen or just black. In order to deal with the render issue I did a few research on website and also asked for help from our facilitator, Steve, he gave me a nice suggestion and solution for solving this problem. I definitely learned a lot for making those environments.  

The third task I had done was animation in hotel lobby. I was making animation by Cat walk cycle. However the walk cycle I made was awkward and unnatural. I felt that maybe I could just key the animation by myself would be easier. Besides, what else for this project  I made was putting the glow sign on the wall of lobby. The sign was with the glow effect and transitioned in colour from pink to blue.

Quite a lot of progress has been made since the last update on creature progression so be prepared for a long post xD

After building and skinning the muscle rig it was time for the fun stuff. (more sculpting and texturing) Initially I had a few different ways I could go about doing this. I know I wanted to go further in the sculpted detail but with little time left I didn’t want to painstakingly sculpt in everything from scratch. Instead I looked once more to Javier Blanco’s pipeline and decided to take his approach. Which was building a sculpt driven by displacement maps stitched together in mari. For this option I needed displacement textures of various animal skin/scale textures, and lots of them. So I had taken my lecturer Steve’s advice and used CrazyBump to turn my texture library into useable displacements.

Once I had projected on my displacement textures where I wanted that detail on my creature, I then exported all the maps. From here I applied the maps as displacements in zbrush. Bam, instantly I had something I could work with, it was no where near perfect but it gave me a base on which I could build on. 

From here I spent a day polishing the sculpt, I could have spent a lot more time detailing but I really had to move on to the texturing.

I gathered some references of the colours and patterns I wanted for this creature, such as these below-

From here I went back to Mari, this was the first time I had used Mari to texture, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I watched a tutorial to help me set up my scene and then had various tutes playing in the background while I worked away.

These were some of the ones I found useful-

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1481-Combining-Painted-and-Image-Based-Textures-in-MARI

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/1603-Essential-Strategies-for-Hand-Painting-Textures-in-MARI

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/633-Combining-Painted-and-Image-Based-Textures-in-MARI

Firstly I painted a base texture, which consisted of various greens. One of the features I loved about Mari was the ability to drive masks made from channels. I used the maps that I had exported from zbrush (normal and displacement) to drive these masks. The control that you have on a channel mask is also amazing, you can play around with the curves and intensity to see in real time (if you haven’t baked your paint in) and see exactly how that affects the texture you’ve just painted/projected on. Mari also has the ability to calculate the AO of the model by the click of a button. You can then use this calculated AO as it’s own mask as well, with all the control of it as well. There were also many other procedural mask types that I played around with such as noise to get some variation in the pattern, colour that I was painting.

I used this techniques to hand paint most of my model, I also used a mixture of textures in places that I wanted to project certain details, such as the eyes, and also the bony areas of his body which I then tidied up by painting over. There are also some nice warping tools that you can use to really put the projected texture in places that you want it. For example I used this particular texture for his bony plates on arms and legs, but of course it wasn’t going to match up exactly however using the spline warper tools I could bend it and pull it to the shape I needed before baking it in.

One more thing that I used quite a lot throughout the process were the layer adjustments and adjustment stacks. For instance, I added a multiply adjustment to a layer which I would then drive by a mask from my displacement map or AO to get some nice dirt or darker colour in the crevices. I used this on the claws and spikes and then painted on the mask in places I wanted more dirt (like under the claws or where they meet the skin). I also ended up with the reddish colour on his bony head and back crest by accident, I was playing around seeing what an overlay of texture would look like with different blend modes like screen/lighten/colourburn etc. However when I hit contrast it made the places where I overlayed the texture and earthy reddy colour with tinges of purple in some areas. I really liked the look this achieved and the best thing about it was that it was completely unplanned.

After I had finished the diffuse texture, I also painted some other maps, like specular, gloss, reflection and emissive. While watching this tutorial, he mentions that we can fake subsurface scattering with an emissive map, I hadn’t thought of using emissive maps this way before and was interested to see the results it would yield. So I painted with a pinkish colour on a very low opacity in places where I wanted this, like on the cheeks, belly, fins, palms and mouth area. Once I had made all my maps I exported them out so I could compile it all in max.

My material setup was pretty complex as I had made the decision to use multiple texture tiles. I used composite maps to link up all my uv tiles and adjusted the U and V values on the bitmap parameters for each layer of the composite map.

 I did however encounter an issue with my displacement maps, when I exported them out from zbrush it exported all my subtools as different exr files and wouldn’t let me merge them in zbrush. So I had to use nuke to combine those that were sharing the same uv tile. I used merge nodes and then re-exported them out.

Once this was done, I went back into max and continued to setup my shader. Once this was done, it was time to play around with the displacement parameters. I wasn’t sure how to set this all up but I found this useful tutorial on that. It seemed like a really weird way of setting up the materials but hey, it worked so I’m not complaining xD

After doing some test renders I came to realised that my shader didn’t really seem to be doing anything, I even cranked up the specular and it made no difference. Then it occurred to me that because I was using vray to render, I also needed a vray material not a standard one. *facepalm* So I quickly changed that and reconnected all my maps. However now I realised I faced another issue. The vray material uses different parameters and instead of specular I needed a roughness map, along with two different types of gloss and reflectivity. At this point I went back into mari to paint some more maps.

 I made a roughness map, and also adjusted my reflection map to suit vray, at this point, I decided to also make a bump map (using procedurals and painting) just to bring out those little details and make my reflective and gloss maps really catch that. I wasn’t quite sure how to setup the vray shader to get the wet glossy look I wanted for the skin of my creature, as there were multiple different slots for reflection and gloss. I did some googling and found this setup that they made to make a wet road. So I plugged in my maps according to what they had done and it worked!

I did some test renders and continued to make small adjustments to my maps in mari until I was happy with the results.