4TH RENDER OF THE NIGHT

every time i render out the finished video of all the different videos together, adobe premiere takes the max renders and makes them super small and really low quality, even by increasing the resolution, re rendering the video and the snippets at a higher rate with more frames, the outcome is sub par at best!

on the disc that i will submit i have included the fully compiled video (even though its low quality) and have also added int he max rendered videos separately

safe to say if i had the money i would be buying camtasia and doing it in there!

RIGGING, video render & sound credit

the rigging of the character took me about two days, as always ruth was my guinea pig and i made allot of mistakes when rigging her, her hair for example made the animating and weighting allot more difficult than i first intended it to be, i ended up using a tutorial to help remind me how to rig and skin and just as a helper to the process, a process i am not well versed in at all and need allot of practise,

tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpU1yqsT8_A

easily one of the best most consice tutorials on 3ds max ive watched in a long time!

the feet on freddie were quite difficult as he is wearing flared boots, i tried to fix it as best ii could but time contraints have set in big time

the twisting of the bipeds bones was bizzare aswell, after i set the biped in place i skinned it and began by doing the animation on ruth, i soon realised i had to redo the process as the arms were twisted in such a way they wouldnt animate properly, next time i think i will model them hands facing down, its all learning curves and dips i guess!, i found aswell that there wasnt enough geometry to animate them as well as i wanted, i at this point am not willing to go back and mess with the models as it would reset the animation and envolopes and would mean a re unwrap (likely) with collapsed UV's and a new biped reskin and texture map tweaks, if i had the time i would but at the moment its a juggle between personal life and uni work.

this isnt the finished look! just a render to show my working!



ive never made a video without the use of camtastia before so that was a learn as i go along job! i used Adobe premier to complile the video and rendered out the turns and animations from 3ds max as avi's, which is something i never knew you could do!. after testing lighting on freddie for ruth i went with a simple 3 point lighting set up my lovely friend (who woks in camera production) told me about, she had no idea if max could do it she just told me thats how they do it in work, its nice to see some styles bening transferable!

now all thats left to do is burn he disk and print out the concept art book which will not contain all the artwork off the blog!

Music used int he video is not owned or made by be, the track is: "son of flyn - daft punk", and is from the tron legacy film soundtrack.

texturing

 I wrote out a list to begin with of the different maps I wanted to put onto each of the models, these consisted of a diffuse (obviously), bump normal map, opacity and a gloss map to make the skin dewy, skin isn’t matte it has a shine to it that we get from the oils our skin produces.

The diffuse layer took a while but what easily the most straightforward, for the skin I used a flat layer of a peach tone and then used differing opacity levels of purples and greens to give the skin some tone, I used a light coral colour for the male lips and the females cheeks, I used a speckling brush I made to stop it looking so flat. I used mudbox to create the gloss and bump maps, originally I was going to sculpt the details and extract the normal maps, but mudbox had other ideas and told me time and time again I couldn’t sculpt onto the female model, so I used the paint tool to create bump maps and then turned them into normal maps and then extracted them from mudbox and added them to the model via the normal bump channel, the male model has two normal maps and the girl only has the one, both also have a gloss map just to dew out the skin and give the shoes and females lips a highlighting shine. I also glossed up points on the piercing.

The tattoos were added underneath the main flat skin texture and tones so they look like they are under the top layer of skin (which tattoos do) this also made them look likely had been there about a year, neither character is covered in tattoos as I thought it ruined the designs a bit so each only sport a few.

Some of the “bloopers” from this process were brilliant, in a funny way, displacement maps like to squash models.

The normal maps didn’t work at first as I had them as psd files and needed to be PNG files, that’s now fixed.

 

texturing Ruth

 

making Freddie's normal map

i played with rendering settings and chose to change it to mental ray, Ive never used mental ray before, and everytime i tried to fix it this happened, so i switched it back to normal render editor.

selection of some of the normal bump and gloss maps i made, some didn't work some did :)

 

adding the gloss to Freddie in mudbox made him look like a demon

my 2 favourite bloopers from the process, i added an opacity map and Freddie's eyes decided to show up in the view like that but were okay when you rendered him out, i was watching a horror film at the time while working and it made me jump!

the second one is the normal maps refusing not to work on Ruth at all and making her entire body speckled like an orange!

 

re-unwrapping ruth for the 3rd time!

ive used the female charcter as a guinea pig for everything and due to this i have had to re unwrap her 3 times now, as i unwrapped each part that needed it because the polys were really distorted i took images so you can see the texture i started begin to go a little messed up on the new UVs

 New UVs

i used a coloured chart to test the uvs were in the right place

Go home mudbox your drunk

i unwrapped both of my characters ready to send them over to mudbox as stated in my project plan, i still at this point had not decided whether i was going to paint my characters in mudbox (it has a beautiful painting tool) and use it with photoshop to add some detailing and tattoos afterwards, or if i wanted to be adventurous and use the sculpting tool as well to attempt to add higher detail, well, mudbox decided that after seven attempts, the sculpting thing wasn't a good idea.

i can only describe it as mudbox being a little tipsy, because i have no idea about this first incident.

when i first added the male into mudbox it alerted me to a problem with the geometry, which it very helpfully highlighted for me, in this an edge had more than 2 connecting edges, which mudbox cannot subdivide by, if you aren't using subdivision this isn't a problem however, so if i was only painting none of these would matter.

it did this for both of the models and in both cases spoke about the characters hair, i then proceeded to fix the problem and re import, with ruth nothing seemed to fix it so i clicked to import regardless, to mess with her geometry anymore (which had nothing wrong with it in the first place) would of ruined the model in max which i wasn't willing to do after unwrapping her for the 3rd time and removing half of her hair poly's, the male however was fine after a quick poly deletion and 5 sided poly clear up!

i proceeded to sculpt lightly on a subdivision of 3 onto the male character, no problems, exported the normals as a PNG  and added them onto the model, when i rendered it to see how it looked i was greeted by this:

 WHAT IS THAT SERIOUSLY?!, Ive even included the normal map below to show how drunk autodesk decided to be tonight, i know its a bank holiday but come on! all i did was emboss some eyebrows and crease his clothing, which i will now be doing in 3dsmax.

 

i have used mudbox before in my self initiated last year and the programme was a breeze! so user friendly, but this year everything Ive tried to do hasn't worked, Ive had classmates who use mudbox as much as i do look over it and be as baffled as i am (on a sculpting front) if i was doing a realistic style i think this would stop me dead, but as i am doing a semi realistic style based off my illustration style i can work around this problem, i was going to use mudbox for skin tone anyway so its not like i am now not using the programme.

just for the sake of its funny, one attempt decided to turn my female character into a super saiyan from dragonball z:

excellent.

Concept art begins

needs a bit more detail but the concept art for the book has begun, its not going to be a thick one like the skyrim but it should have enough to give an idea of design

Freddie Build 2

This build went by extremly quickly and only took about a day to do after the head, i have made all the fiddely mistakes with and freddie was an absolute breeze, he just needs to be unwraped ran through mudboz (not allot for both of them more just to get some clothing normal maps) and then textured in my semi realistic style :).