3D Hard Surface and Organic Modeling Image Gallery

Click here to link to my 3D gallery. Followng is an outlne of my character creation pipeline, for film, games, broadcast, architectural renderings and fly-throughs. I hope to be onl;ine shortly with character packs for rchitectural and crowd flling use and then shortly following the custom creation of digital stunt doubles using a rapid prototypng system to achieve the necessary detail to use at film resoluton.

This Week's Creature Feature

Generally, to get the power of a new software, plugin or module available to me as a technical user I create a project by devising a problem which would take into account the features want to access and push them to the limits and beyond of my current knowledge. I get bored easly..heh. So I had read about the Los Alamos lab people running across something they called the Ganesh particle. It had exuded from quartz and grante rock when pumped with electricty. It had a trunk like probiscs lookng appendage it would penetrate cells with and seem to alter ther DNA. Of course these clowns tred to weaponze t and were met with some kind of entity that scared the bejeezus out of them and they shut the project down ( Dan Burisch-google it). So I thought ..what would that creature look like f it was a fourth dimensional being. named t a Tessaractoid after the fourth dimensional geometric figure the Tessaract. t would have, in its native dimenson a 360 degree line of sight n all directions. It would not necessarily have a front and back. It would be able to move inm any directon instantaneously via it leg stuctures. So I first created the skeleton in the turntable animations below. I have also constructed a hard FK rig for it as well as a User Data slder FK so each limp can be comntrolled va slider. Ideally after tests a combination of the two is needed or one for one style of shot and another for a second style. I will be adding muscles from the Cinema 4D excellent muscle system as well as skinning the muscled skeleton so the skin reacts wth the muscles and bones system. I can't wait to see what ths will look lke.

This Weeks Render

Ths week I chose to rerender some shots of a concept car made a few years back. will change the set of renders weekly and archive them as they change up. This week features the H2OGT, a water pwoered internal combuston engine driven USA Muscle Car harkening back to the late ffties and early sxtes with the bu;llet grll, snarling front end geometry and chrome stamped metal headlights. It goes from 0-100 in as fast as want consdering I am the animator..heh..

Digital Stunt Doubles and Crowds - A Rapid Development Pipeline

Body Morphology

I have recently been developng a rapid humanoid prototyping pipeline to procedurally morph body styles, faces, texturing, hairstyles and clothing as well as an entire battery of hard surface modeled props, weapons and virtual sets. The goal is to recreate any given human, their skin texture, clothes style, hair style and accessories for rapid crowd generation and digital stunt doubles for the movie, gaming, architectural, broadcast and other mediums. The Turntable Anmation below shows the morphing ability of a number of dissimilar body styles, as well as the ability of the mesh to deform into any number of extreme positions and still maintain proper edge looping and distortion.

All of the meshes have the same point count and as they morph from one to the next body style any particular version the mesh is morphng through can be extracted. This opens interesting possibilities such as a male and female combination acting as parens and producing an offspring with both of ther characteristics variable by morph sliders set up to enable rapid prototyping within the production pipelne . It also opens up the ability to age a gven character by provding a youthful and an aged version of the same mesh and morphing between the two to create an instantaneous aging process. At any point the meshes can be extracted and tweaked.

Facial Morphology

Below is a clip of the animation to show the facial morphing. Along with body character styles I will be able to extract a full vertex weighted, textured and hairstyled character from any point in the tween between morphs. By creating and then choosing as extremes of morphology any given ethnic group or demographic can be set up and the variants pulled out of the pipeline to establish a base crowd for populating architectural fly throughs. For instance, a firm has a contract wth a Chinese company to produce architectural fly though or walk through renders of a new mall in Shanghai. A young, old, male and female featuring oriental facal topologies can be placed in the morph extremes and the timline moved until a new potential, with enough differing characteristics is reached and then the mesh is extracted from the pipeline. Or a film pittng Zulu warriors against Ghenghis Khan (now THAT I gotta see!) could have dozens of warriors rapidly prototyped with tall African features,tightly curl and frizzed hair skin textures on one set and squat Mongolian features and skin textures, with short to long black straight hair.on the other.

This clip displays the mesh morphng between six different facial types.		The above pics show the first and last faces in the morph sequence with some hair added and a procedural skin texture added. They will both be given a full texture treatment in the next step of the pipeline.

Next Up - Texturing

The models so far have been done using proceduratl textures. The next step in the pipeline is to texture and set the UV's so that each mesh can have unique characterstics such as wrinling, blemishes or beauty marks, freckles or not in varyng amounts as well as cosmetics such as eye shadow, lipstick and cheek rouge for the female.. Textures can be morphed and the amount wieghted for each step in the pipeline and extracted fully textured with varied eeclor, cosmetics shadings and hair length color and style.

UV Color Map for the female figure base mesh. The textures wll automatically morph along with the new face or body style when run through the pipeline.

The color map will go in the color channel and be multiiplied with the base color of the channel to provide a range of skin tones.. I have procedural textures in the luminance channel to augment the subsurface scatterng, light wrapping and small veins and blood vessels. Since all prevous separate textures were combined to makle a base color texture and to keep it simple. Parts of he mesh that used to have Reflection channels ticked off are now replaced in the set of channel maps such as the eyes and iris reflection maps. I as well have used Lumas with Anisotrophy set to shrinkwrap and Venetan Yellow to create silky speculars that follow the flow of the mesh, very much lke real skn. I can combine a Specular color map wth this shader effect by putting Lumas n a Layer channel and multplying the Specular Color Map, gvng stronger speculars on the nose and lips, tongue roof of the mouth and teeth. The Bump Map will give small imperfections, wrinles, pores and blemishes to the skin giving it a more photorealistic effect. I also have a Displacement map set up to provide small volumetric surface changes lke scowl wrinkle bulges, smile dimplings and the like. I may end up creating a small move with a number of frames with each frame correspondng to a different set of displacements associated with a phoneme or emotional gesture. I then can blend in displacement and jump va expression or keyframing to another displacement map.

Next Up - Weghting and Rigging

The rgging and weightng can be ytransferred to any other mesh in the pipelne and should work . I have nearly completed ther weghting adjustemnts to allow proper morphology of the mesh wth low to lttle dstorton during extremes of posng.