Long Overdue Update!

Oops, it's been a while. Life got a little... well, crazy. Anyway, since my last update I've mostly been working on the character sculpts and more research. I've been working my way through Special Effects: The History and Technique by Richard Rickett, which is a really interesting read, I highly recommend it. I've also been working my way through an FxGuide article by Mike Seymour called The Art of Rendering, which has a lot of information about the different renderers and some interesting history as well. Mike Seymour has a couple other good/useful articles as well - The State of Rendering - Part 1 and The State of Rendering - Part 2. It's really amazing to read just how much goes into developing these render engines and how much they have developed over the years.

As far as modeling goes, I'm trying to wrap up all my modeling and sculpting in the next few weeks. This stage has taken a lot longer than I anticipated because I'm still a bit slow and clumsy in ZBrush, but I've definitely learned some good tricks and am starting to get faster. Regardless, I need to wrap it up and move onto the texturing stage - the goal is to finish my thesis by the end of August, so I need to stay on top of everything and keep up a pretty good pace.

Another awesome SIGGRAPH paper

Stumbled across this gem while doing research for my thesis paper - Painting by Feature: Texture Boundaries for Example-based Image Creation, presented at SIGGRAPH this past summer (2013). Basically the idea is using images as your palette, as opposed to preset colors and brushes. While the idea of using images to paint from is not necessarily new, the method in which the authors approach it is new, and quite intriguing. The example images are interesting as well, and really showcase the possibilities of this approach.

 Painting by Feature: Texture Boundaries for Example-based Image Creation

Simulating Painterly Textures

Interesting tutorial from 3DArtist with some tips on creating painterly textures using 3D painting programs. I don't use ArtRage, but it's something I will definitely play around with in Mari and Photoshop

http://www.3dartistonline.com/news/2014/02/how-do-i-simulate-painterly-textures-in-3d/

Color and Lighting Study #1

Took one of the Rockwell pieces I'm going to be attempting to mimic ("Tackled") through photoshop and pulled out some color and lighting information to use as reference when I start my character surfacing and lighting set-up. Something to note is the color palette is primarily earth tones.

Another Sculpting Update

Making slow but steady progress on the male character. Refined his proportions and started blocking in some basic clothing. Still chipping away at the hands, they look alot better than they did several weeks ago but still need work. Managed to sculpt some pretty nice looking ears, which I'm happy about :-)

look at that ear!

Ears are evil

Well, trying to model or sculpt ears anyhow. Maybe I'm the only one, but I have always had an incredibly difficult time getting ears to look right... but I guess practice makes perfect right? I've been looking at alot of tutorials and modeling breakdowns to get an idea of how other modelers approach ears. It's not that I don't understand the actual anatomy, I just need to figure out a good way to re-create it in CG.

I found this great reference photo from this awesome forum thread, this modeler has been working on a photorealistic human model for the last year and a half, and watching his progress is pretty amazing

New Approach to Non-Photorealistic Rendering?

My friend just linked me to this really interesting article about a new approach Pixar is working on that will make animated characters look actually hand-painted rather than simply being stylized CG. I'm curious to see where this goes, since one of the debates I'm having with my thesis is how I should make my characters look, if I should mimic Rockwell's style exactly and go for a very painterly look, or bring the characters more into the realm of stylized CG and/or stylized realism.

"Pixar Makes Painterly CG"

Render Breakdown

As promised, here's a more detailed breakdown of my lighting and rendering comparison. It would have been too much of a beast to try to make it work in the blog format, so I compiled everything in a PDF file.

click to view PDF

* If you use Chrome, the file will load in the browser instead of downloading *

Initial Rendering Comparison

So I was finally able to set up a series of render comparisons between Mental Ray (with unified sampling), V-Ray, Arnold, Mantra and Keyshot. This first comparison was a pretty simple set-up, mostly working with figuring out render settings and different light attributes, since each renderer has it's own specific way of setting up lights. Now I get to move on to more material specific comparisons and see how the renderers handle more complicated shaders like glass and subsurface. I will be posting a more in depth write-up about this first comparison shortly.

** to view image at full resolution, right-click and open image in new tab **

Arnold!

So I've been playing with SolidAngle's Arnold renderer and I'm having a blast. It's so simple to use and will get you really nice results pretty quickly. It uses a different method of sampling that lets you keep your renders low quality for quick look development, and then when you're ready to render, you turn up your samples and get a high quality render without worrying about the look changing (ie no need to worry about using low-poly stand-ins or final gather settings, etc). Both Digital Tutors and FxPhd have in depth tutorials on using and optimizing Arnold, but there are some good free tutorials floating around as well. One good one I found was by Sony's Jon Tojek, which manages to cover most of the basics in about 20 minutes. Even though Jon does cover linear workflow in his tutorial, I found another video that is a quick and simple explanation of setting up linear workflow in Arnold, for anyone who doesn't want to scrub through Jon's video to try and find the right section.

Jon Tojek Arnold Tutorial

Linear Workflow In Arnold