Archive for October, 2009
So this Pirate Project was by far the most intensive and time consuming project that I’ve done to date. In fact no freelance, school, or personal project even comes close, but it just looks like a normal project. There’s nothing really intricate about it. There is no insane detail or crazy long render times (ignoring the first test renders of hair of course), I didn’t need to use proxy objects or instances. I had no use for referencing, so why did this project take so long to finish? It wasn’t for lack of time put in, I worked on it most days. In fact I have lost track of the amount of hours put in this project… it is far above 300… so why don’t have I have much to show for it. Well actually I do. It may not be in the artwork-let me explain.
This project started out as a portfolio piece… something that will turn heads, hopefully something that would get me a job. This being my purpose for it, I tore through it in the beginning. Going as quick as I could, spending all day on it. I was getting good reviews, nothing horrible and then I got one critique that made me put things on the backburner for a couple days.
The critique was something along the lines of “This is really great work, but I think you are missing the point. You are creating this to show, you need to create this to learn.” I took this to heart and realized he was right. This project needs to be about personal growth and bettering my abilities through learning. So I slowed down.
I went back to old problem areas and fixed them, I re routed much of my topology, creating a cleaner edge flow, even though it wasn’t completely necessary. I broke down the materials that I was using and figured out what made them tick. This part was fairly easy. I only used two different type of materials-exluding the hair. The Mia material (or for those Max user the Arch and Design material) and the sss material, both created-or at least in part-by Master Zap.
The sss shader was by far the harder of the two to understand, especially with the version I was using. I was using the “newer” version which had A&D reflections built in, so they would produce realistic reflections. I realized with the sss material that the radii and the depth didn’t matter soo much-these values could be within the ballpark and be ok. What mattered most was the overall scale and spec along with your maps. You need spot on diffuse and epidermal maps to pull off a realistic skin shader. This gets pretty tricky because there’s an endless amount of mixing and matching and everyone has their own way.
The mia material was pretty straight forward glossy=glossy, samples=samples diffuse=diffuse etc… The trickier part was the BRDF curve. Small small changes to any number gives you far different results. This is pretty lame because this is the most important part of the shader to get it right.
Tip for getting good metal: Use the IOR fresnal (pronounced FRE-NAL, it’s named after some french dude)and set it to a super high value of something around 30 (air is 1)
The mia material is amazing, it can be used for just about everything, from satin, to cloth, to leather, to wood, to conrete, to metal, to glass-whatever. It is a physically accurate model which means you can’t make it behave incorrectly!! OR maybe you just have to try reallly reallly hard.
I also learned that what makes a character feel like a character isn’t the realistic materials or the fancy lighting, it’s the character of the character. It’s the pose, it’s the glint in the yea, it’s the curve of the lip that says “I know something you don’t.” THIS is the hardest part to nail in the character. I wasn’t able to hit this nail. I got close and had a couple glancing blows, but I never managed to nail it.
But this is what learning is. You keep practicing till you get it right. You don’t have to get everything right in one go, it’s a process. From here on out I know that I am a much better modeler, lighter, and texture artist, and I know exactly what I need to work on… everything. haha-that’s what being an artist is all about isn’t it? You’re never done, you’re never fully satisfied with an art piece, there is always something more to be done, to be learnt. It’s a process.
The fun is in learning, exploring, creating, and imagining. It’s about building up your texture and reference libraries and then bragging to all your friends that you need to by another TB hdd because the one you just bought 6 months ago is full due to texture collection, reference gathering, and tutorial videos. It’s about sitting at home with your dual monitor setup, sitting a nice comfortable chair, watching house/big bang theory/scrubs/lost/mythbusters/futurama/ or listening to music, and losing yourself in your work. It’s about wondering why it’s getting lighter outside instead of darker and then realizing it’s because the sun is rising and you really DO need to go to sleep because you have a final exam in 5 hours. It’s about wanting to create and learn new things and new ideas. It’s about learning that even though this is all you want to do, you really do have to go out to the bar with your friends every once in a while and catch up and have a good time. And finally, it’s about realizing it was never about the money, or working at Pixar or for some top secret govt. program (Even though I would never turn it down and would brag to high heaven if that ever happens… hire me-I’m young and cheap =D), it’s about doing what you love, it’s for the sake of the game. You do it so one day some little kid will look up to you like you’ve done to the industry giants your whole life.
So to conclude this episode, you shouldn’t create art to show, you should create it for yourself-to learn-and for others in hopes that it will effect them the same way it did you.
So I ended up using: Maya, 3Ds Max, Mental Ray, Renderman, Wings 3D, Headus, Zbrush, Bodypaint, Photoshop.
Maya was used for just about all the modeling. Wings was used for some
of the simpler things such as the sword and belt, mainly so I can get
practice using a different modeling program. There was no way I was
going to use Max for modeling, I don’t understand how anyone can model
productively in that program. Maya was also used for my first lighting
setup and all of my material tweaking. I couldn’t get the sss shader
to look how I wanted, I kept getting overly dark shadows, so I
switched to Max which solved that problem even though I used the same
type of lights and distances. It’s a pain to move things from one 3d
app to another, but at least MR. stayed the same =). Since I was still
using MR, I was able to transfer over all material attributes w/o any
problem. The final render was done in Max
Zbrush was obviously for sculpting. Headus was for unwrapping,
Photoshop for texture creation and color adjustments, bodypaint was
for additional painting work and for seam painting.
At first I tried Hair in Maya and it just didnt work which helped me
make up my mind if I wanted to move to Max because I heard Max has a
pretty good fur/hair system (if anyone has been around me, they know
my vast hatred for Max, but desperate times call for desperate
measures). I then tried hair and fur and could pretty decent results
fairly quickly, but render times were absurd (8hours w/ raytracing, 10
minutes w/o-which is still a while just to tweak). I knew Renderman is
really good with hair and I had a copy of Renderman on an old hdd. So
I plugged in that hdd and spent a couple days learning how to do maya
hair again. Turned on RM set up the same lighting setup with a couple
tweaks, turned on deep shadows, cranked a couple settings and voila
beautiful renders at around 2 minutes a pop. This is one of the
reasons I had difficulty with getting nice contact shadows between the
hair and the body. 2 different 3d programs and 2 different rendering
programs, not pleasant.
So I was going to write an article on linear workflow because no one is doing it! (aside from every film house :-)) But I figured that this topic has been talked to death so I am just going to give you some links that are easily found on google, but this is mainly for people that don’t even know what a linear workflow is. And maybe because I’m feeling a bit lazy and wanting to finish my pirate character:
Pre-reading:
Reading:
Forum Thread:
Heres a quote for the famous Master Zap:
If you render on a “standard” computer monitor (i.e. an sRGB monitor which has a practical gamma of 2.2 on average) with no regard to gamma anywhere in your workflow (i.e. pretending the monitor has gamma=1, like unfortunately most software defaults to), then when you think you are making something twice as bright, you are actually making it almost 5 times as bright.
This makes even the most trivial math turn out completely wrong. Basically, your renders come out as if 2 + 2 = 10
This is why highlights blow out unrealistically, why reflections look wrong, why you can’t seem to be able to use physically correct lights with a quadratic falloff, and why you have to save everything in comp with a bunch of horrendous dirty tricks like “screening” your speculars back on (Yuk!).