Reel Pro 2 - Robot

Whew! Just finished another five week term. We double tracked with another class, so we had even less time in those 5 weeks to get our projects done. Anyway, here it is:
(Vimeo link for HD: https://vimeo.com/51805607)

This model is by the super talented Phillip Shaw. (You can see his stuff here: http://vimeo.com/25474721). Which, he modeled based on the concept of Doug Chiang.

Thank you soooo much Phil, for letting me take your model, turn it into a toy, and glitz it up. I know he did not intend it to be emasculated like this. So, thanks for letting me do it. (And I sure hope Doug Chiang doesn't mind...).

Anyway, there are a lot of CG robots out there, so my instructors said I should come up with a few ideas to pitch. I came up with a few goodies I think, but thought I would have the most fun with this. Plus, I'm sure no one will ever ask me to do this. Might as well take the risk and have some fun while I'm in school.

Here's the image I used to pitch this idea (I'll save the other ideas to do later):

The idea is that it's a boy robot which belonged to a boy, that was robot-napped and prettied up by a girl.

For each pitch idea I considered what the personality would be like, and how they'd move and be animated. Ex. The old concrete robot is old, stable, and stoic. Its steps are heavy and deliberate.

This robot is like an insecure teenage boy that is embarrassed it's been altered to look so girly. So, it'll move pretty lightly, since he's young and athletic like a lanky teenage boy. I imagine him animated to be super frantic, trying to hide and rub off all the glitziness.

The first week, I spent UVing this guy. I used a combination of Maya, Roadkill, and learned Headus to experiment and see how what was the fastest way of UVing 586 pieces of geometry. I also spent that week working on a demo reel for a reel review, which took so much longer than I thought. Then we had the other class to sit in and do assignments for. So, it was pretty hectic, and I was itching so much to get UVing over with and start on the textures. However, I realized that UVing is SUPER important in terms of planning for texturing. It makes it easier if you plan it out and get the UV's right the first time.

Then it was a matter of testing it to look like the right plastic with good lighting (which I should still adjust). I thought I had this figured out first and then quickly jumped to the fun part of layering on the textures. But my teachers very rightly switched me back to getting the materials right.

I also thought about what I might have problems with and need to figure out. A big glaring potential issue was glitter. I figured I should take some time at the beginning to test, rather than run out of time and scramble at the end.

And my teachers were really helpful in giving me suggestions and feedback. But, I didn't have the glitter figured out yet, and time was winding down, so I moved on to getting the whole robot shaded before getting back to the problem of the glitter. It also gave me some time to think about what worked/didn't work before, and find time to run out and buy some glitter glue to examine.

Here's the thought process I had with the shading of the robot. First, it's an old toy that belonged to a boy that was taken and prettied up by the girl afterwards. So, here are the elements of the robot body texture:

1) discoloration
2) yellowing
3) scratches
4) dirt and grime
5) clean up or wipe down by the girl
6) pink marker all over
7) new stickers
8) glitter
9) puffy earring stickers

Here's a video to kind of demonstrate the thought behind the layering of textures:

I actually put the most thought into the top of the body (which included the old sticker). But the foot was faster to demonstrate this with (and faster to render).

A problem I had was getting the marker to look right and went through a few versions (there are some versions that I can't find. It was probably when my Maya was crashing, and I didn't save my bucketed previews.)

I had a white plastic bottle of Shout to draw and sharpie/marker/highlighter all over to look at. It was also a balance of how young is this girl? Is she really terrible at this? Or is she older and a girl who very lovingly and carefully colored the robot over in pink? I decided to go with the latter because when I started texturing it super messily like a little girl, it was like chaos. And I wanted people to be able to look at it and not think, "Goodness. What is this mess? I don't want to spend another second looking at this ugly thing." I think I could still go back and mess it up a little more though. Give it some more imperfections and authenticity.

Also, another thing I learned with the marker pass is that Zbrush and Mudbox don't seem friendly to painting 3D on hardsurface objects with edge loops running across geometries (more obvious in the previous image with the unmotivated white lines running horizontally across the geometry). No matter how carefully I went across it in Mudbox to paint, it just didn't like me painting where there were thin edge loops running across. I went back thinking it was a UV issue, but after some tests and asking around, I realized it was just something that couldn't be handled right now in Mudbox. It was also something I didn't encounter texturing an organic geometry like the Ogre, with even topology running across it. I ended up fixing it in Photoshop, which made me really glad I UV'ed to not have stretch.

For the new stickers, it was the same sort of problem with making it look tacky like a little girl plastered it on there, or still look pretty. I also did some tests for the puffy earring stickers, which were essential... Hahahahah. They actually were! Nothing says "little girl" like puffy earring stickers that we all had when we were little. And the biggest challenge was to sell the idea. So, I really needed those stickers.

Previous version of the puffy earring sticker.

And time was quickly winding down, so I went back to the glitter. I still had my glitter geometry, but I tested it as a layer to add onto my layered shaders.

I loved it with the glitter EVERYWHERE. Hahah.

Thanks to Jenny for the eyelash idea.

Here it is again comped together with AO and zdepth for a macro effect. (I also learned this term how to render out a zDepth and comp it in Nuke with zBlur to create the macro feel.)

So then, I started rendering, and part way through the renders I decided to check on it... to see that the glitter was crawling and flickering like crazy! So I did some quick tests with a sphere. Up close, the glitter is ok. In a wider shot, it's crawling everywhere! I hadn't encountered anything like this. So I googled and looked around for a solution. Then learned to turn up the samples, which helped, but also gave me less of a cushion by the deadline since it increased the render times.

Here's the flickering/crawling of the glitter:

Here it is with the samples turned up:

Anyway, at the end of these crazy 5 weeks, I learned a TON. And they were all totally unrelated to the things I learned last term. Texturing organic vs. hardsurface models is VASTLY different and I'm so happy to have learned so much in the past 10 weeks.

My teachers said they wanted me to struggle this term, which I did... a few times! And I ended up having a really great experience of troubleshooting, being resourceful, finding answers, and testing things out very efficiently, since we had so little time to work on our projects this term. Which also means, I'll still be going to fix this project up and make changes!

Texture Reel

There's a reel review coming up, so I decided to go for it and put a reel together. Here it is!
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/50247300

FYI, it's true that putting together a reel takes so much more time and work than you originally anticipate.

Reel Pro 1 - Dragon Nest Ogre Texture

I just finished Reel Pro 1, where we worked on whatever we chose to be our discipline. I was fortunate enough to get this model from Rodney Brett. Here's a turntable of his model: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z30kfA0874

Rodney modeled this character from the white ogre in Dragon Nest, so it's already a 3D game character. But he did a high res sculpt of the guy, and I took it to texture.

Here's my texture work: (Although you should look at it on my VIMEO https://vimeo.com/49217722. I'll start uploading my other older videos on there soon too.)

And some stills:

I was almost a week behind in this term when I got back from SIGGRAPH, so it was sort of like a sprint for me to get going on learning about subsurface skin texturing, figuring out how to tackle texturing this guy and his accessories, getting it all rendered out, all in a little over 4 weeks. However, I got plenty of help and tips. Alaina Hower is an excellent texture artist, and her experience with her projects helped me a lot in applying it to this ogre. My teachers and classmates were also super helpful in giving tips, tricks, and feedback.

I drove back with my friend Amber from LA the morning of August 10th, and we dutifully went to class that night. I was super exhausted, so I don't think I was exceptionally productive in lab, but I came up with a game plan to get this stuff presentable by finals. First, work on the body and figure out subsurface and skin texturing, so I can get the body looking ok (he's mostly skin and face). A little after the halfway mark, I can figure out how to get his accessories looking right. 

Here's my original plan for the guy plus a blocked shader pass that I did right before I left for SIGGRAPH.

Then it was a process of me trying stuff out quickly and failing a few times before I get something looking ok. I've UVed certain parts of this model multiple times. I also have a bunch of different versions of... well, everything.

First, getting the skin figured out. I hadn't done it before except to play with the dials a bit, and seeing barely anything change for my T&L projects. So, Alaina was super helpful in this along with several of my teachers and lots of online tutorials. It was a lot more work than I anticipated. I felt like I was painting a million maps to layer over each other, and I'm always wondering whether my dials need to be adjusted, or I need to go back to change my map. But, playing around and doing tests helped me figure out what dial does what and what I needed to adjust on my maps. Here are some of my first attempts of the skin. It think it's easy to make it look too waxy when you start out with surface scattering on the skin shader. You just get so excited when you see subsurface working.

Even after I thought, yea. I like that skin... I realized. Oh man, he has a tattoo!!! Then I had to go back and draw that thing on and play around with it on the subdermal and epidermal layer. It's cool! If you only have it on the subdermal layer as completely black, with nothing on the epidermal. It really looks like a faded tattoo. Then it's a matter of getting the edges to be exactly blurry so that it makes sense for the scale of the guy. I started out with the edges very blurred, which made him look like a miniature tiny ogre. So then I went through and sharpened it up, then blurred the edges to look good close up. I'll probably go back and blur the edges some more.

A big problem I had was figuring out what to do with the eyes and teeth. I tackled the skin thinking that would be the toughest part. That was an INCREDIBLY false assumption. For the eyes, the concept shows them as white gleaming eyes with no pupils. No pupils? How should that end up looking? So I thought of what this ogre might be. I liked the idea of this white ogre being in a cave, where he doesn't need eyesight, so he's basically blind. I looked at a ton of photos of eyes from humans to creatures that are blind or evolved from their lack of need for eyes. Or eyes with cataracts... or maybe eyes of albinos. I also modeled some different eyes with separate geometry for the lens, pupil, and sclera with different sizes and proportions.

Here are some quick tests I did for the eyes after I sculpted some eyelids for the guy. My teacher said I can deviate from the concept and try some things to see what looks best. I thought the black beady eyes could also work, but my favorite was still my first attempt and idea of how to tackle this character's eyes.

My what-if-he's-albino eyes test, where I gave him tiny pupils with red to represent seeing light shine on the red blood vessels of his eye. Looks super silly, but I love this render. He looks so surprised, since I gave him eyes with a tiny lens and pupil.

"*GASP* What's that you say?" Hahahha.

The design of his mouth is also pretty interesting. He has no gums. He has no lips. I wonder how he eats, or if he can even close his mouth. I thought maybe I can make his teeth like horns protruding out of skin, but it didn't look right. It didn't look like a mouth, and it's clearly a mouth with teeth. I decided that he's a mouth-breather (like me sometimes!), who has his mouth open all the time, breathing loudly like a nerd. Probably just continuously drools and  makes garbled grunts to communicate. I gave him some glossy looking gums, but he doesn't have lips. It was just gums blending into the skin on his face. So I decided to model some drool for the dude, and I really liked the look of it to help sell the design of the mouth.

Onwards! Towards accessories! At some point I knew my skin and face still needed work, but I was itching to work on the accessories and just getting something on those things. Plus time was winding down, and the body will require extra time for rendering all that subsurface scattering. The problem I usually have is putting too much bump. My brain thinks, I want to show it's THERE! But then realize I have to super tone it down, which probably still needs to be done, even with my final version. It's also a matter of getting the color and spec to look right for the material. Then with a teacher acting as art director, I did a little bit of modeling adjustments that Rodney was super nice to let me do. Gave him some new earrings. I'll have more time next term to figure it out (planning on texturing a hardsurface model). Here are some of my old renders of the accessories. A lot of my metals were looking like stone (which I still think is the case in my final):

I need more practice with getting these surfaces to look right (which I'm determined to practice and figure out next term!). 

Afterwards, it was a matter of figuring out my AO pass. I learned I could get my displacement map to pump into my surface shader. Also, made a mud pass to add to the hands and feet to make it look like he uses his hands to dig in the dirt. Then, I just rendered and comped them all together using Nuke.

And here he is!

People think he's gnarly looking, but I think he's pretty adorable! I didn't mind staring at this guy for 4 weeks, and I'm happy to continue working on him.

Thanks again Rodney, for letting me use your model! And the artists behind the White Ogre in Dragon Nest for a cute concept.




Programs used: Maya, Mudbox, Roadkill, Photoshop, Nuke