Texturing a Mudbox Mesh Tutorial pt.2

This time around, things were done a little differently. Although the principles of the previous example were still applyed to this character, I've also experimented with actual textures. Considering that the skater model, unlike the luchador, is made up by various meshes (helmet, top, shorts), most of which have a fabric look to them, I simply used actual photos. Same for small elements on the actual skater like pads, gloves and shoes. In my case, I could take actual pictures myself, but goes without saying that you can 'borrow' off the net as much as you need. You'll end up stretching and cutting enough of it to make it yours in the end. (Fig.1&2).

Adding tattoos was another way to cover the areas where the mesh shoulders meets the neck and the chest. Mind you, to make tattoos look good around this areas takes a bit of time exactly like smudging the colours as shown on the luchador tutorial, so it's not a way to cut corners... you've been warned. (Fig. 3,4&5).

Texturing a Mudbox Mesh Tutorial

This past week I've been diving right into the client project. Is going to be a video aimed to sollicit NTU Alumni that graduated in multimedia (Virtual Environments, to be specific) to donate to the Alumni Fund, so that future talents will have a chance to apply for bursaries, graduate and get a job in the industry. The video will include some animations, and the first character I've been working on to be included in the project is a Luchador (mexican wrestler). During the modelling and texturing process, I came up with the idea of saving screenshots of the work in progress, to show what I did and how. It's basically a tutorial on how to create textures in Photoshop that show some 'depth' (shadows and highlights) even before the model is imported in 3Ds Max and placed under a light of some sort. It will hopefully be helpful to people that are looking for an alternative to flat textures and, of course, the principle can be applied to a model created in any other 3D application (Max, Z-Brush, etc.). Enjoy.

I simply picked the standard Mudbox Human mesh, buffed it up a little bit in Mudbox (the basic human male mesh is slim and athletic but not 'beefy' enough to look like an in ring competitor) and proceeded to paint different areas of the body in different colours to represent the various (all skintight) items of clothing. I also used darker colours to trace guidelines of where the shadows will be. This stage doesn't have to be long and laborious. The painting in Mudbox should be just accurate enough to give an idea of 'what's what?' when working in Photoshop. The result is shown below.

While working on the texture in Photoshop, I suggest you to import the model in 3DsMax and apply the texture you painted in Mudbox. This is because every time you make a change on the texture in Photoshop, and as long as you save the texture with the same name, the model in Max will show you the changes in real time. (Fig. 1)

At this point, go nuts... if you can skin a cat in various ways, the same principle can be applied to paint a wrestler. If you are comfortable with the airbrush tool, use that. If you rather use a soft custom brush, go ahead. Personally, for realistic purposes I use one tone per colour, then I use the 'dodge' and 'burn' tools to create the highlights and the shadows. Keeping an eye on the 'range' and 'exposure' controls also allow you to get exactly the desired effect.

Whatever painting method you go for, if the texture is simmetric like in this case, I strongly suggest you to work on only half of it, then later duplicate it and flip it over (working hard is commendable but working smart is better...). Also, pay extra attention to the areas where the texture join in with other areas... this is usually where the 'smudge' tool come in very handy. Keep saving your progress and check the model in 3DsMax until you are fully satisfied. (Fig. 2&3).

The examples shown on Fig. 2&3 kept me busy for a good while. Don't cut corners! It can be frustrating at times, but do yourself a favour, keep 'smudging' away until the various joining areas look uniform and smooth. A simple base colour plus the shadow (achieved, in my case, with the burn tool) is all you need to get basics right. Once satisfied with that, you can start applying the highlights (again, in my case, achieved with the dodge tool, Fig. 4).

The above part is the most laborious but once you get it right, you'll feel pretty good about it. Keep doing the same for the remaining areas (arm, hand, pelvis, legs, etc.) and keep an eye on the hue. You don't want to end up with areas with a darker tone of shadows (or brighter highlights for that matter) than others, unless there's a good reason for it! (Fig. 5).

Once you are totally satisfied with the look of your model and feel that both shadows and hilights couldn't get any better, it's time for the 'one offs'. In this case, I'm talking about asimmetrical details like the wrestler's name on the belt and the mexican flag on his boots. Check those details accurately. I almost made the mistake to have an inverted flag on the right boot that read 'ocixeM'... (Fig. 6).

Now it's the moment of truth... duplicate the Photoshop layer you've been working on, flip it orizontally and match it in the middle with your previous layer. Save it and take a look at your model in 3DsMax... Do you like it? Was it worth it? I hope so. In my case, I got exactly what I was looking for. A model with depth on the texture, even without any light shining on it. (Fig. 7).

Final Project DP3 Rational

This time the animation required as the final project had to be a re-interpretation of an existing script. We were given three possible scripts chosen by the module leader to pick from, or we could’ve chosen our own. I went for the latter option.

I decided to re-interpret a story taken from a Marvel comic from the late 70s. It’s about the death of Gwen Stacey, Peter Parker’s (Spiderman) first girlfriend, by the hand of the Green Goblin. If you’ve seen the first Spiderman movie (first of the new millennium, NOT the 70s trilogy of movies, a true abomination…) you probably remember the scene where Mary Jane is thrown into the emptiness by her captor, the Green Goblin, only to be saved by Spiderman’s web-slinging skills. All good, people cheered. But in the comic book things went a little differently: It was Gwen, not MJ to be captured by the Goblin, and most importantly, she doesn’t survive the fall. Spiderman did manage to catch her in time, but sadly the whiplash snaps her neck.

So, this was going to be the core scene of my animation, but what about the re-interpretation part? I simply thought: If the original story is about a man with spider like powers, why not twisting the subject the other way around? Why not making it about a spider with human sensibility? So off I went…

The whole story is set in a kid’s bedroom. A brother and sister bedroom, which gave me the opportunity to fill it with whatever props and toys I would’ve found useful for the animation. To ease the characters into the story, I started from the typical boy-meet-girl situation. Considering the average size of a bedroom that supposed to accommodate two young kids (and their stuff), that’s a large environment from a spider’s perspective.

Both spiders are in fact virtually free to roam around the room and entertain themselves with whatever they find lying around. They can use a plant pot as a park, they can use toys from a farm set to pretend they are at a petting zoo: they can ride a wind up scooter on a bunch of comic books scattered around the floor like on a speed track, using other toys as obstacles. An I-Pod provides the background music to all these shenanigans.

In particular, a Hot-Wheels type bridge set and a bunch of Lego models and bricks turned out to be very useful for two key moments of the animation. I also scattered a few Spiderman and Marvel clues around: Comic books, action figures, blankets and pillow covers for the boy’s bed… I almost forgot: The Green Goblin! What could I use to represent the Green Goblin on an insect scale? It obviously has to fly… but not a fly, too small. Not a bee, too yellow. Not a butterfly, too pretty (or so they say)… a dragonfly? They certainly have a certain mystique about them.

Before starting to model an animate I had to consider the storyboard and how to fit the various scenes together (and in what order). Unlike the project on our previous term, this time I kept the storyboard pretty open to last minute changes (I learned from my mistakes).

Overall, the most important thing I learned while working on this animation is this: Never, ever again I’m going to use the ‘hair and fur’ effect of 3Ds Max unless I’m working on an industry standard machine. It takes too long to render frames that would’ve taken much less time. You could almost grow a real beard while you wait…

P.S. You can check the video out on my site, just click on the above link and go to the 'Animation' section.

LEGO modelling

Evening ladies and gents.
These are some pics of a LEGO set that will be included in my DP3 animation... I had so much fun with it that if I could go back in time (not much, just four months...) I'd set the whole animation in LEGOLAND! (aside from choosing the appropriate lottery number combo...)

Along came a spider... and a dragonfly!

Howdy folks!
The past spring break wasn't all about fun'n'games for yours truly (with the exception of attending a friend's stag do on friday). Between finishing the room where my animation will take place, sculpting more props and toys to make it look like there are kids actually living there and sculpting and rigging the models, I've been pretty busy indeed... in particular, because I wasn't too keen on the look of my spider.

After a surgery a few weeks ago with our module leader (Andy, a good sport...;-) who kindly showed me how to sculpt a spider from scratch, I went home and started my own in similar fashion...

However, I soon realised that this wasn't going to do it for me, and that was for two reasons:

1) As much as I tried to work on the proportions and various other details, the spider still looked unmistakinly 'Andy'. If you check his blog and see his digital sculpting, you'll know what I mean.

2) Because of reason N.1, the model didn't fit the scene a bit... If you look at the work in progress of the room a couple of posts below, you'll notice that the proportions and the general look is pretty realistic.

In such an environment, the above model would've looked more like one of the toys instead of the main character, unless I completely re-design the room to fit the style of the spider (something like the house that Snow White shared with the dwarves in the Disney film, or maybe like those mushroom architectures where the Smurfs lived in...) and I certainly don't have time for that, not at this point!

Plus, this is an animation project, and the animation part is what I have to concentrate on as much as possible because even if I consider the concept art side to be my stronger suit, we are going to be marked on the quality of the animation, not the concept behind it!

The new spider however, whilst maintining some cartoony details like the glasses and the goggley eyes, looks more like a real spider (expecially from a distance!) and fits the environment much better.

Also, I finished sculpting and rigging the dragonfly that's going to wreck havok in the animation... I may decide to add some transparency to the wings... I don't know yet, we'll see...

The Art Of Seeing... plus rant!

I'm gonna keep this short and sweet 'cause I'm bitter enough.

We were asked to upload a bunch of textures on Flickr for a visualisation project called 'The Art of Seeing'... Fair enough... a good 3D environment without good texturing isn't going to impress anybody, so I certainly see the point in collecting as many different textures as we can (and considering my past as graphic designer, my collection over the years took a good while to be uploaded...) until this happened:

So, basically I wasted almost four hours to upload 15 folders (903 textures in total)

Just to find out that only the last 200 of them to be uploaded will be available to view... unless I spend £47... which considering I already have a website, whoever at Flickr came up with this idea, can seriously go and get Flickr'd! Rant over...

P.S. To Roma: If you want to check what's available on my Flickr account, here's the link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ur77textures/sets/. Personally I'd rather burn you a disk with my whole collection 'cause what you'll see on Flickr is less than the tip of the proverbial iceberg (4 sets out of 15... go figure!)

DP3 - Room

These pics shows the room where my next animation (due in may) will be set.
There are still a bunch of 'props' that I got to add, basically more toys (a lego set, a dolls house, a hotwheels type road+bridge track...) also, I'll find the time to do the webbing on the spidey action figure (I promise!).
As you can guess by the pics, this is a room shared by two kids (bro&sis) aged about 9-10 and 12-13... No prizes for guessing which posters, bed and desk belong to whom...