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. 

Modeling Update - Boots!

Finished the boots for the male character. The girl character's shoes should be a quicker sculpt, since they are fairly similar in that they are worn leather, probably hand-me downs, the main difference is the style is a lower cut shoe as opposed to an actual boot. I had a fun time making these boots, I've tried modeling shoes in Zbrush before and never had very good results, but I'm pretty pleased with the way these came out :-) 

Modeling Reference 

Obviously I tried to get as close as possible to the boots illustrated by Rockwell (far left), but since it's a bit more stylized not all the details are visible, so I had to look for similar boots to get reference for some of those smaller details

 Boot UVs and Low-Poly Mesh 

This will be a good model to test displacement on, typically if was using Mental Ray I would export my next subdivision out of Zbrush, which has a slightly higher poly count and tends to hold displacement details better. 

High Poly Zbrush Sculpt

I'll probably end up doing another fine detail pass to layer on top of the existing bump/displacement, but I prefer to make that last pass at the same time as I'm texturing, since alot of the details will come from the color map and it helps me determine how much more detail I need to add to the bump/displacement. 

Texture Reference

Obviously the next step for the boots is texturing. Again I will be trying to match as closely as possible the boots pictured in the Rockwell illustration, but I will definitely need leather references to create the final look. These worn leather swatches are fairly close to the look I want. 

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!