Since I haven’t done any realistic modeling recently, I’ve decided to give the blending life contest a go and try modeling a photorealistic human character. It’s fun doing this kind of stuff again after a couple of years modeling monsters, rodents and bunnies. I’ve certainly learned a lot about keeping meshes clean during big buck bunny. Even though the characters were not photorealistic, the amount of freedom of movement (squash & stretch) they had to be capable of, forced me to rethink my approach to developing mesh topology.

The biggest change I made to my workflow is not using Optimal Mode anymore for drawing the mesh wireframe in edit mode. Although it has its advantages for displaying the poly flow very clearly, it makes things look too pretty. Since you have no clear idea where the vertices and faces really are, the underlying mesh tends to get very messy if you don’t watch out! (This is one of the bigger mistakes I made in Creature Factory).

Using this “freeform-extrude-fill-poly-by-poly” workflow is just a personal preference of mine. It might be a bit slower than box modeling but for me it’s easier to think about the topology that way… dunno.

A nice modeling mantra: keep it quad - keep quads regular - concave quads are evil ;)

I will try and capture as much of the process as I can, modeling, texturing, shading and rendering, etc. I hope that’ll force me to finish this bugger! I based my mesh loosely around the reference provided by 3d.sk. The video is sped up 10 times.

enjoy!

.andy

long time no image!

this model has been lying around for a couple of months, it actually started out as a sculpting test during peach in amsterdam. this week i decided to finally get my act together and finalize it.

this is not a dinosaur.

since i didn’t have the powerful 8 core / 8 gb memory monster machine i had in the blender institute, i had to cut back one level of subdivision. which is not too bad since the surface texture does a decent job of providing addtional detail. here’s a shot at the highest level, with no textures:

the model and the concept around this image evolved quite a bit, here are a few of the design stages i went through. eventually i decided the model is powerful enough (and me being too lazy…), too much environment surrounding the scene would only distract. so that’s why i opted for the “simple statue” type of shot.

this was an early textured version, can you spot the barcode? i had a lot of fun making the skin look less reptilian and more like a mammal.

a test with blender’s fluid sim and a screenshot of the final scene. the workflow for the model was pretty straight-forward. i first modeled the creature in subdivision surface which i then detailed in sculpt mode. from that i extracted a high dynamic range displacement map which was projected back on the original model (also including an armature for basic deformations, extremely easy to set up in a matter of seconds thanks to heat weighting!) the model was posed, lit, shaded, rendered and composited in blender.

thanks for watching,

.andy

i just returned home from LA after a 3 day trip. our flight was delayed over NY, so i missed my connection (among thousands of others) and had to stay over night. which was not a bad thing since i had the chance to do a little trip into the city.

anyways, siggraph was lots of fun, but very exhausting. i had a great time with Ton (blender guru), Bassam (director of Elephants Dream, now more american than ever), Sacha (director of Big Buck Bunny, now rocking in singapore), Nathan (rigging master and hugging ninja) and William (animation master and danish person)… plus many others from the blender crowd such as Claas E. Kuhnen. (from BlenderArtists fame), Fweeb and Tim Formica (BlenderNation) we had a right schedule, giving presentations at Disney, Siggraph CAF, Rhythm & Hues, lunchtime at Dreamworks. and manning a corner of the HP booth down at the tradeshow exhibit. it was in fact so busy that i missed almost all activities and presentations, oh well. siggraph this year was a bit messy anyway… kinda.

below some crappy pictures i shot with my crappy cellphone camera. i always try to take pictures of things nobody else takes pictures of, that’s why you wont find many photos about siggraph itself. read more actual siggraph stories at Victor’s blog, Claas also has some photos. BlenderNation has some stuff too.

this is nathan, need i say more?

ton’s head is sticking in on the right. we had a true american breakfast that morning: fake coffee with fake burritos, fake pancakes and fake coffee with fake cream…

that day we had also our disney presentation, sadly the mouse doesnt let us take pics of his territory.

the amazing american experience continues on a road trip into the desert on the weekend before siggraph.

nathan is reading 3D research papers during the trip. yes… research papers. needless to say that they were awesome. (texturing directly on the mesh without the need of UV mapping)

also in the blender bus: ton, margreet (front row), william, sacha, (middle row) nathan, bassam and me (in the cheap back seats). we’re on the way to palm springs, to counterbalance the geekfest that siggraph is.

here this strange place called nature. complete with trees and rocks. we were just amazed what technology can build, it must have taken ages to craft all those trees and get them up here into the mountains.

the morning of the first siggraph day, we bumped into Victor Yap who Sacha and i had met in singapore (he’s organizing the blender BOF at siggraph asia) we also finally found an awesome place with real breakfast close to the hotel. that day we had the blender birds of a feather meeting. the room was completely packed. we had a chance to rehearse our upcoming BBB presentation.

i also improvised a quick and dirty, but shameless self promotion of creature factory.

staring in awe at the amazingly ordinary dreamworks parking garage. we had an informal lunch that day with two of the dreamworks fellas (and blender veterans).

dreamworks has an awesome campus in ugly burbank, LA. complete with lake, table tennis, fountains, foosball and gaming room.

hijacking the maxon cinema4D meeting room for last minute presentation rehearsals. (ton has a hate-hate-relationship with maxon). the show itself the next day went by pretty smoothly.

on the pic next to it we see blurry LA lights, forgot when i took it.

ton is driving and william leads the way with his all-knowing iphone. right after the BBB talk we went straight to rhythm & hues to give a more technical presentation of our work. we were happy to see that people were interested in open source dev. someone even commented on how beautiful blender’s interface looks like!

after that we got a little tour of the place and even got a glympse of their in-house software (which basically looks like maya so their freelancers can pick it up quickly).

we also saw the bone-chillingly cold render farm room, crazy dark halls with huge black curtains… what seemed like an endless LAN party was their freelance worker space. upstairs long corridors with original cels from movies like steamboat willie and princess mononoke.

brighter and more artsy was their concept area, lots of casts and sculptures from their past and future projects. of course this is their standard show-off visitor area, so taking pics was allowed.

back at siggraph. nathan stumbled over some of his former teachers and colleagues at cogswell college.

they had a booth at the tradeshow floor, and looped BBB all day long with the caption “cogswell student nathan vegdahl animated and rigged for this movie”… sigh, i wish my school was that nice to me. ;)

on thursday we went to the reception party. the event was held at the LA. dodgers stadium during a baseball game. before i elaborate, some fun trivia.

left: ton’s amazing parking skills. right: corrected by jason van gumster of handturkey studios also known as groo, fweeb and (new, thanks to nathan) jaseeb.

the reception was - masterfully summed up by jason’s expression on the right (2nd pic) - slightly awkward. imagine 5000 geeks crammed into a tiny space in and under the ranks, eating hot dogs, cotton candy and drinking beer and soda. did i mention awkward? i did see a lot of people having fun though… so i still haven’t made up my mind whether this decision was pure genius… or just plain stupid.

some images of manhattan. i had only 5 hours to walk around, but i definitely want to come back. NY generally seems like a nice place. compared to LA it’s much friendlier and at least the streets aren’t dead after 8pm! i walked from times square over broadway into central park. went to the MoMa to grab a copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book featuring Elephants Dream. down south through the city and north on the hudson river.

after a 3 day epic journey and tale of missed flights, waiting in lines for hours and hours, smelly airplanes and unfriendly airports i finally returned back home. as usual, what remains of siggraph is memories, paper and plastic.

.andy