Kon's 3D WIP Art Page

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That took longer than expected. Expression morphs were done in a day and a half but rendering it took another day. Each of the expression renders took almost an hours to render at 1368x2000. With all the re-rendering to fix minor problems, I finally gave up and render it all at 410x600. =P Hair shadows aren't rendering correctly. Trying to fix that now and re-render it all at 1368x2000 overnight or while I'm at work so I can compile it into a 4104x6000 image for print. I do all my final renders at this resolution. It's one of the reason why the previous Rah images takes 6 hours to render. I need quad core!.. or better yet.. dual quad core!

And yes.. I like making goofy expressions. =P This time I wanted to be a bit more accurate in the expression setup so I took several photos of myself as reference. The teeth was re-adjusted so it'll be a bit more realistic. It was too perfect before and it looked odd. Now it's more crooked and no longer perfectly symmetrical. Also added a slight fang to make him look more menacing.

Fanime is just around the corner.. and I'm so behind. ;;;o;;;

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Still haven't done the expressions yet but I'll leave that after I'm done resting. My eye is throbbing because I been staring at the monitor too long. Getting sick a few days ago was not good for productivity.

This is my most detail model yet. The final polycount weights in around 100k after subdivision and 61k before. For this model I went with several 4096x4096 (aprox 25) textures. That was a mistake.. I quickly flooded my ram and it crash and burn. The bump maps are now 3072x3072 and diffuse texture at 2048. They looks a bit pixelated up close but at least it render without crashing. Another mistake is not mirroring my textures. This not only made the texture go beyond my memory limitations but also it's a very slow process to work with large PSD files. I don't think the advantage of unique metal patterns and rust stain for each side is that important or noticable. Oh well... next time. =P

Rigging went a lot smoother this time because I understand the XSI rig a lot more. UV mapping with UVLayout was a big success. Probably saved me at lest 4 days of mapping hell. XSI has a wonderful hair system. I use it on the eyelashes and stubbles. Rendering it out at 4000x6000 wasn't too bad of a performance hit and minimal memory usage. In comparision to Max, the stubbles alone wouldn't be able to render at this resolution. I'll probably try to use it on a full head of hair on the next new model.

After I finish up with the expressions.. he's done. I might do a few more poses in preparation for Fanime later. Now, I'm going to rest.. I'm still feeling a bit sick from the flu and I stayed up way to late today. =P

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR FULL BODY SHOT

Texturing is done!!! .. with the exception of some tweeks here and there.

I took the day off today so that's why this update is in the middle of the day. Also why I was up till 8am trying to finish up the texture. I just woke up about two hour ago to make these renders. Now that my eyes are rested... hmmmm.. chainmail needs tweeking. Eye's looks a bit too glossy... Don't cry Rah! Pants are too smooth. I have a jean texture on it and it's looking kinda silky. What happen to the specularity?.. O_O! It seems to be more muted than what I remember last night... Will check that later. Not liking how the back of the hair looks like it's floating on the cape. I think I need to enable the area lights on the backlight.

See those spotted patterns on the floor?.. For these "quick" renders I set the Finalgathering rays to a low value of 30.. Default is 50 and for "good" quality renders, it starts at 300. Finalgathering takes about 20 mins to calculate per angle. I try rending at 300 rays once. It took 6 hours and it was only 1/3 of the way done... And this is not including rendering time. O_O! Rendering the final images are going to be a bitch!

I'm going try and complete him by Sunday night. Here's my plan for the next 3 days:

Friday - (Today) Model and texture the sword. Do texture tweeks and finalizations.
Saturday - Rig Rig Rig!
Sunday - Hopefully complete Rigging Hell... then make the expressions.

Posing and rendering is going to be during the weekday... My guesstimation is most of the time will be waiting for the computer to do the calculations and renders. I'll need some interations of letting it run overnight. Then tweeking in the morning and start the process again while I'm off to work.

Almost there!!!!

YOUR OPINION PLEASE!

Which of these colors do you like best? The white hair version doesn't count. I just wanted to see what it would look like on him.

There is a really annoying problem about LCD monitors and dark colors that I noticed. It can look almost all black on one monitor but look just fine on another. My primary monitor at home is a Dell 2405FPW. On this monitor, the armor has a few black spots but most of it is dark gray. His hair is dark brown. This is what I intended him to look like.

However, on my second monitor which is a Dell 2005FPW, his armor is mostly black and his hair is all black. I have this same problem on my work monitor as well. The image at the top is adjusted for the darker monitor.


If it looks too bright as it does on my primary monitor, look at this image instead:

http://pics.livejournal.com/yoseshiro/pic/00034550


This really sucks.. I'm not sure which one to go by.... I just calibrated both monitors when I install the new graphic drivers a month ago. Arrrrrggg!!!


I guess I need to ask another question. Which of these images look like dark gray armor with dark brown hair on your monitor?

Lighter version for dark monitors: http://pics.livejournal.com/yoseshiro/pic/00033bss/g20

Darker version for bright monitors: http://pics.livejournal.com/yoseshiro/pic/00034550



Also, if you want to check out the full body shot:

http://pics.livejournal.com/yoseshiro/pic/00035erd


EDIT: DOH!!.. Just noticed "F" and "E" are out of order... all these late nights are affecting my brain functions. O_O!

Well.. didn't make my deadline. =P I'll try to finish him next weekend then. If not, I'll take two days off work to work on him.

Texture is almost there. Had to change the lighting to work better with the armor so now I need to re-tune the hair and face materials. This is my 3rd time in the lighting of the armor that I need to do revisit the SSS material.

Not too sure about the red accent color. So far I like it the most. I've tried leaving it at black but it gets lost with the rest of the armor. I didn't like the look of blue. Will experiment with other colors scheme later. I might make the armor a bit lighter so it'll be easier to read some of the details. The chainmail looks pretty noisy at this distance. I might have to enlarge the rings to get a better read.

I found out that Finalgathering does not work well with several super large textures. It's either than or I have flooded it into virtual memory. I probably use about twenty 4096x4096 maps far. I waited an hour and it was less than 1 percent done. GAAHHHH!!! At this rate, it would have taken over 100 hours to complete!! Noooooo!!!!

After shrinking most of the textures to 1024x1024, it renders in 15 mins! I have 2 gigs of ram.. and while rendering it says it's using 1.65 gigs and 0.4 gig free of PHYSICAL memory. My guess is it must of hit virtural memory anyways.. and the last 0.4 is reserved for whatever reason. Anyways.. with the shrunken textures, rendering memory was at 1.35... so somewhere between 1.35-1.65 is when I hit the GOD DAMN SUPER FUCKEN SLOW rendering time. Not really liking the blurrier texture.. but not willing to wait 100 hours.... I NEED MORE MEMORY!!!


EDIT: I just view this image on my work computer and.. gahhh.. it IS too dark. O_O. I could of sworn it looked OK at home 4am last night.

For scary version with TEETH!!! He should have brush between every battle.
http://pics.livejournal.com/yoseshiro/pic/00031e2t

Head is about done. Will do the final tweaks after the rest of the body is completed. One thing I find useful is to get each part of the model about 80-90 percent there. Then I can fine tune as a whole. You'll be surprise at how much one part can affect another... A big problem I had yesterday was when I added in the hair, the eyes was completely messed up. It was a pain in the ass trying to get the two different type of lightings with geometry that has conflicting properties to work together. In version 6.0 of XSI, they finally support final gathering with transparency!!!.. and with a modified material that splits the SSS and enables indirect lights I was finally able to use SSS with final gathering. It was kinda messy at first.. but I'm glad it's all behaving now. WOO HOO!! It's much better in version 6.0.. but XSI and transparency are still frustrating work with.

I need to draken the scape, I can see some bald spots.. such as where the sideburns should be... whoops.. ^^;;;

Now that the hard stuff is completed.. the rest should go quicker.. I don't think I can make my end of month deadline though. I was hoping to get more done today.

This is to make up for the lack of updates last week. =P

Eyes are still work in progress. It's Fencer Girl's eyes without the reflection or specular map. Skin has been tweak some more. Now with stubbles instead of beard. Been reading up on XSI hair system and used it to make the eyelashes and stubbles. XSI hair system kicks ass! It's TONS friendlier than Max's. I tried to use for Rah's hair.. but rendering time was just too much. When the armors gets textures with reflections, it's going to be a bitch to render... so I'll save it for a lighter model.

Time for sleep..z..z.z.zzz

Sorry for the lack of update last weekend. Visually, there wasn't any changes and I didn't want to show the same model with checkered pattern.

This was the most painless UV mapping I've ever done for a high poly model. All thanks to UV Layout! The longest part was to make the cuts for the seams and then piecing it all together in texture sheets. I could of just half ass it and just toss it in a new texture sheet when I ran out of space but the low poly texture mapper in me would not allow it. Took a total of 3.5 days to UV this bad boy and he has tons of pieces. That is fast! It could of easily taken 8 days or more and results wouldn't be as accurate. What's really cool is not only does UV Layout evens out you UV... it's keeps them all at the same pixel density! I been using it as work as well on low poly prop models. The results weren't as good but I was able to shave off 1/3 to 1/2 the time it would of taken me without UVLayout.

Still haven't model the sword yet.. I couldn't wait to start texturing.. =P

Armor textures are temp to make sure I don't screw up the lighting when I adjust it for the SSS material. I didn't use SSS last time because it didn't play nice with Final Gathering. This time I using a combination of FG and traditional lighting. I wanted to use GI instead but it's god damn slow.. especially when in combination with SSS. I heard the most realistic results can be achieve by using FG and GI but I'll save that for whenever I upgrade to quad core.

I'm pretty happy with how the skin turned out. About half of today was tweaking the textures, SSS material and lighting to try and get the best results.

If I have time tomorrow, I'll bring it into Zbrush to generate a decent bump map. Also going to read up on XSI hair system and see if I can add some real facial hair and eye lashes.

Not sure why the lower neck is so red. It should of been thick enough. I even seal up the bottom but the results were the same.

Going to try and finish it by the end of this month. If I can't, I'm going to have to make some cuts to the list of things I'm working on for Fanime.

For wireframes.. check out:
http://pics.livejournal.com/yoseshiro/pic/0002xp95


Modeling... DONE!

OK OK.. not really. I still need to model the sword. ;;;o;;;

Then... UV HEEEEELLLLL! Here's really hoping UVLayout is going to save me tons of time. I think Gattsu took about 2 weeks of mapping everyday... Rah is mostly on weekend so that would be.. 7 weekends of mapping.. ;;;;;;o;;;;;;;; Even if I had to do it the old fashion way.. XSI is way better than Max when it comes to mapping...so it'd be more like.. 3 weekends... ;;;;;;o;;;;;;

Did a lot of optimization on the chest, legs and fingers. Took about 100k polys off.. but after adding in the rest of the armor and drapery.. it's now at 630k after subdivision. O_O! Base model is only 65k though.

Can't wait for mapping to be done. I'm planning to take it into Zbrush to generate the normal maps and start texturing... whch is my favorite part. =D

Back to work tomorrow... so must sleep early today.

Upper body is done modeling except the feathers. I'll save that and the cape for last. He's at about 430k poly after 2 levels of subdivision. I should be done modeling sometimes next weekend.. then it's UV hell. I'm actually looking forward to it so I can give UVLayout a thorough test.

Yeah, I know his butt is flat. That's a low poly placeholder that deflated after subdivison.

Don't worry girls. When I'm done with him, it'll be a butt you'll be proud to slap around. =P

Chest is done except for the feather geometries on the shoulders. Doesn't look it.. but tons of work was done on the chest. Last week every armor plate was a separate object. Now it's one continuous mesh. Yeah, that was a pain in the ass for little visual changes but necessary for good deformations when it comes time to pose him. The continuous surface topology will greatly minimized self-intersecting polys.

Pulled down the jaw and widen it a bit because he was looking a bit too feminine. I'm all for the bishy look but for this character I think he should be more rugged. =P

Arms still needs more work done. It'll have to wait till next time. I won't have much time if any to work on it tommorrow.

Also, work may be lightening up so I might be able to continue working on it on weekdays.

I can't wait to texture the armor! All that metal and wear and tear textures are making me excited... Now that's too much info!! =P

Chest armor still not quite done yet. Ah well.. next week then. Decided to round out some of the plating and bevel some edges. It's more polys.. and I know it's gonna be a pain when it comes final render time... but it's looking much better. Most of the small details will be done in the texture.

Till next time!

Hair geometry is completed. Chest armor is about half done. I still have a bit in the front and all the back left. If I don't get to it Sunday..then next weekend then. =P

I switched over to XSI 6.0. They kinda broke the selection tool. Sometimes you have to click slightly upper left of what you want selected. Annoying as hell! Render progress bar for current frame is nice.. took them long enough. Max had it since version 1.0. O_O

So sleepy...z.zzzzz.z.z

Not sure how he can see during a fight but hey if you don't look good fighting, then don't fight. Wars are created so metal can be in fashion and to accessorize!

I'll finish the hair next weekend.

Finally started on a new model. This one is going to bee damn detail! It's pretty rough right now. I like to block out shapes and volume before diving into the details. Think of this as the loose sketchy figure without the cloths usually drawn by a blue pencil.

His name is Rah.. but I like to call him.... RAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! I know I'll be saying that a lot during this project. This will probably be my most detail model yet. God help my computer. O_O!


Check out WenM's concept character here:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/44561282/?qo=22&q=by%3Awen-m&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps