V-Ray Material Resource

Came across this excellent resource on the basics of V-Ray materials with renders to illustrate the different attributes. The whole website (viscorbel.com) is overall a good resource. The V-Ray tutorials are all for 3ds Max, but I found most of the principles applied for V-Ray in Maya as well.

http://viscorbel.com/vray-materials-theory/

Character Updates

So my characters are pretty much done! Only things left to do are: n-cloth for the clothes, which will be done after rigging/posing; hair, which I am still figuring out how to do; some surface detail on the girl's sweater, which I may end up combining with the texturing process; and the little girl's shoes, which I'm having to re-do no thanks to some major wonky geometry/zbrush issues (which thankfully have been mostly resolved). At this point I'm thinking that fiber-mesh will be the best option for hair. I was examining Rockwell's illustrations, and while his characters tend to be slightly stylized or caricatured, the hair is fairly realistic. Sculpted hair would be much too stylized, and while there is the option of painting transparency maps on planes, it tends to lend itself to "neater" hairstyles, whereas my characters both have messier hair. An added benefit of using fiber-mesh is that since I will have to convert it to geometry in order to have it be compatible with all the render engines, it will allow me the opportunity to see how each one handles such high levels of geometry. While I am confident Arnold will have no issue with it, I am curious to see if Mental Ray can handle it without crashing.

Speaking of hair, obviously because she has none right now, the little girl does look a little odd. But in the few very rough tests I have done she looks much better with hair :-) The hardest part of sculpting these characters for me was trying to make sure their characteristics matched to either male or female. Even though boys and girls around this age do tend to have very similar features, they still needed to be distinguishable from each other. Their outfits are not taken directly from one Rockwell illustration, but rather pieced together from several, as I took some artistic license to envision what they would be wearing in my own interpretation of the "Tackled" piece I am using as my main inspiration.

As soon as I double check all my UVs for stretching, I get to pass these guys on to be rigged, and while that's happening I get to start texturing and shading. I'm hoping that part of the process will be much quicker, since I do feel I have a better idea in my mind of what the textures should look like (whereas with the modeling I wasn't initially sure what direction I was going with the characters' final look).

Modeling Update - Leather Helmet

Finished up the little boy's old leather football helmet. It still needs some finer surface detail like scuffs and scratches, but again, a lot of that will be created during texturing. As of right now the only thing I need to add model wise is a chin strap (which is honestly something I'll probably do in Maya instead of Zbrush)

Modeling Update - Football

Pretty straightforward model. It looks pretty clean right now, but the extra details in the textures and a good shader will make a big difference in getting it to have that dirty scuffed look (it just has a standard zbrush material on it right now, nothing special). This one will be fun to texture :-) 

Renderman!

The wonderful people over at Pixar have been kind enough to provide me with a temporary Renderman Studio 18 license for evaluation purposes, yay! Up to this point I have been using 3Delight, which is based on the Renderman rendering algorithm, and provides a free license - but is not used in the industry nearly as much as Pixar's Renderman. I got excited when I saw Pixar would be releasing a free non-commercial license of 19, but then I realized it won't be released until mid-August, much too late for my purposes. But it gave me the idea to reach out to Pixar and see if they would let me have a free license of 18 to test until 19 is released, since it's really not worth it to pay over $200 for a license I'd only use for a month. The good news is since 3Delight is so similar to Renderman, it shouldn't take too much work to switch over my test scenes, and ultimately I think I'll be much happier with my final comparison.

Thank you Pixar! :-D

Modeling Update - Boy Character Progress

Decided to post a WIP of the boy character where he's at right now. I'm trying to finish all my modeling by Friday (July 11), so hopefully the boy and all his assets will be done by tomorrow so I can concentrate on the girl character and all her assets. Obviously right now his sweater is just a shape block with no details added, but when it's done it should closely resemble the old beat-up sweater in the Rockwell illustration. The shorts are another area I took artistic license, choosing to go with the idea of what kids might be wearing if they chose to play an impromptu game of school-yard football. So instead of donning full gear for a serious game, they would just quickly grab a helmet, and maybe throw an old sweater over their uniform. I'm debating if I want the boy to be wearing a collared shirt or not, I may just leave the collared shirt to the girl and have the boy wear a normal crew neck shirt under his sweater, I think it will go more with the look I'm trying to achieve. I also need to break symmetry on the boots, but right now I'm trying to concentrate on getting the rest of the assets detailed before I go back and make more minor tweaks. His hands are also still feeling a bit off, I think they may be a bit too thin, so that's something else I need to tweak before I can say I'm completely done. And then lastly, still debating how I want to do hair - if I want to sculpt it, use planes with transparency, or use fibermesh.

Modeling Update - Socks

So I took some artistic license with the socks, with the look more geared towards my own interpretation of the piece. After all the final result is basically my spin on the original Rockwell piece, recreating it to reflect aspects of my own childhood experiences. When I was a kid, we always had hand-me-down soccer socks that were either too big or so loose from being worn they would sag and fall down when we ran. So the boy's socks are based off of that, rather than Rockwell's longer, less baggy football socks.