Intership and Animation

It's been a while since I updated and let's just start with the big update first. I tried putting off writing this anywhere since nothing had been finalized yet but I guess it's official now. I'll be interning as a VFX artist at Grid-VFX in Ghent! My contract was signed last week. I'm really excited to work on some of the projects they're running with! I also found a place to live only two days later. I guess I got really lucky with that one.

Here's their website

As for what I am working on right now; it's a short animation supposed to last between 15 and 20 seconds portraying a change in attitude. I'm using the Max for Maya rig which animates like a charm. Nothing new there. As of yesterday I've finished blocking out poses and am fixing the interpolation on a grand scale in the graph editor. I'm getting some weird rotations and translations from only one arm and the head. The rest is working fine.

For this animation I am trying to challenge myself by making an animation for a drunk guy. It's about 100 frames of alcohol induced strolling but I really want to get it right. Below is my block out. So far I've worked out about half of it. Still the blocking phase though.

In other news, I've been fooling around in Nuke but nothing substantial has come from that. Fun program; need to learn more.

Kind regards,
Pim

A day's work

I'm still working on finishing up my final retakes. After that, hopefully, I'll be able to do my internship. I've sent out several application letters with my updates portfolio and art reel I made about a week ago. So far I've only received two replies of which one invited me over this week. Exciting!

Today was a regular Gamelab day so I worked on props because that is what the 'game' needs. I can't say much more about it but I guess I can show off a few quick ones. Used a hipster post processing effect and a little depth of field. Also, I realize I forgot the hammer for the gun. Will add next week!

I also re-uploaded my art reel as both Vimeo and YouTube seemed to have issues with the .mp4 h.264 codec. The issue was explained on one of the threads on the Vimeo forum. Whereas most formats are simply accepted and altered according to the YouTube and Vimeo processing system, anything using the h.264 codec is cut in both brightness and darkness directions. So if your videos covers a 0 to 255 white value the processing system will cut 16 values off of both ends and stretch the newly created graph to the maximum values. In other words, it washed out the whites and the blacks when it's fully processed. So I rendered it to a 22gb .avi with a YUV-60i index and it turned out way better than I expected. Hardly any color difference, no white balance issues, sharpness is up to par with the original video and the frame rate -although cut in half- is still quite acceptable.

Kind regards,

Pim

Demo Reel 2013

Threw this together last night and spent the rest of the night uploading it to Vimeo. I also uploaded it to YouTube but the compression makes it look crappy and blogspot won't allow me to change the size of the embedded video when I directly input it from my YouTube account.

So here's the Vimeo upload.

Kind regards,
Pim

ps. Also spent the night updating my portfolio.

Red Skull - Game Ready Character

After finishing the topology for all the different meshes and baking all the textures out separately I of course ran into numerous issues like ultimately forgetting to actually bake the laces to the mesh and adding volume to the aesthetical be-hind of the character. The eyes were also not amazing so I brutally moved some vertices to get those the way I wanted them. Less almond shapes; more actual eye shape.

What I did eventually was model the laces out individually and bake them down to a single plane, which I subdivided over the length of the boot. This turned out to be a little bit tedious to get right but was totally worth the effort as (in my opinion) it actually looks better than baked down laces.

After I finished the character for my course I did a quick polypaint and baked down the vertex information using xNormal to the individual assets my character still consisted of. Below is an example of the polypaint. For the tattoo's I made several different alpha maps which I used as stencils in Zbrush. Quick drag and drop.

Screen snip from the Zbrush viewport.

Quick render from Marmoset with some hipster post-processing effect.

T-Pose Turntable

The turntable above is the one I posted to the Lunchcrunch facebook page. Didn't get any feedback, but that's okay. I got 6 likes. Worth it.

After fixing some of the issues related to the mesh and textures I went back into Maya to create a small IK rig to pose the character in a few characteristic stances. Skinning was a little harder than I wanted it to be as I was experiencing a lot of stretching and errors while posing. In the end I decided to simply pose the rig and paint out the stretching and twisting that was occuring. I like to think I managed.

For each pose I made one or two renders and a small turntable. Mostly because it was part of the assignment; partly because I thought it was fun to play around with some of the functionalities Marmoset Toolbag has to offer.

Red Skull at attention.

 At Attention Turntable

Red Skull looking at the Life cube he has to carry around all day.

Michael Bay co-produced these  images.

 Life Cube Turntable

For this image I couldn't lift his leg all the way up since the stretching would be too bad.

Second image of the marching pose.

Marching Turntable

That was it for the long blog post. I'm off working on another project and that one also needs a lot of work.

Kind regards,

Pim

ps. Apparently I'm doing this blogging thing for a year now. Sweet. Also, I tried this out in Verold.

Red Skull - Sculpt Finished

I figure there's not a whole lot more to cover about this character so this blog post will just be a collection of quick snips from each subtool. Tomorrow I'm going to start retopologizing this guy and hopefully get some quick bakes done before the end of the day. The deadline for this project is the 4th of November so I guess I'm in okay shape to finish it before that date.

The boots. I'm going to make the laces using deformers in Maya.
The shoe sole is a separate subtool.

Jodhpurs; horse riding pantalons.
Belt and buckle are separate subtools.

Front view in perspective mode.
I'm still considering adding a tongue and teeth.

Arm. Center image is isometric.
For the hand I used my previous sculpt and made it skinnier; as if burned and then healed.

The face. Might still add a little more volume to the cheekbone and eyebrows.

The belt and buckle. Spent very little time on this.

The back muscles. I'm pretty proud of this area.
It took a lot of iterations to get some of those muscles right. Very undefined area.

Overal feel of the character.

Kind regards,
Pim

Red Skull - Face & Tweaks

Since my last update there's been a small holiday combined into a lot of work spent on my Houdini project and documentation; something I might upload in the near future but for now that stays under the radar. It's far from finished and it looks like nothing yet. This is one of those things that either looks awesome or doesn't look like something at all.

Overal feel of the character so far.

I finished the lower arms and interior of the upper arms together with some reworked on small details in the abdomen area. If I have time left after doing the final pass over the body and rework the details in that I will spend more time on the pants. Right now they just don't feel like actual floppy, puffy pants to me. Can't put my finger on it entirely. Perhaps the issue is fixed once I push the folds inside the boots.

Arms.

The wrists still look a little thin to me. They're lacking volume and some muscle definition. I'll add that once I'm happy with the face and head. Also, please notice I am not trying to go for hyper realism; something I showed in my first post about this character. It was done very well by 3D Total and I'm trying to move away from that.

Face front and side.

This is my progress for just today. I downloaded a regular skull from some website but found it to be anatomically inaccurate so I ended up using the 'averageman' skull from Zbrush. I was planning on using it anyways but I felt there were some inconsitencies about it. The eye holes seemed out of proportion compared to the zygomatic and the chin. Regardless, I used it as a placeholder to shape up my body mesh and continue sculpting from there. So far I've been able to add detail using only the subdivision levels I already instigated for the mesh body. Tomorrow I'll give it it's own layer and continue adding more details.

Head without flow into the body.

Will fix the flow of the skull and it's muscle-ly texture tomorrow. Will sleep first and look at it with fresh eyes.

Kind regards,

Pim

Red Skull - Pants & Boots

Simply updating my work on the Red Skull sculpt. I'm following two other pretty intensive courses so progress is much slower than I would like it to be. Regardless, I fixed most of the symmetry in the body. Right now I still need to fix the lower arms and the head. I'm thinking about using the basic skull featured in the default Zbrush sculpt "AverageMan". It has a great topology and it features no muscle structure whatsoever. Exactly what I need for my stylized version of Red Skull.

Felt like going for a different shader this time.

I've been working on the pants a lot which are almost finished. The folds are pretty much done, though they still need to fold into the boots which will cause more folds. Rinse and repeat.

Close up of the pants and boots.

The boots are a work in progress as the tongue doesn't make much sense yet. I found that Red Skull is illustrated with use of many different footwear. Either the illustrators or Red Skull himself must be very aware of trending boots ;). In any case, I didn't like many of the different shoe and boot designs he was drawn with so I figured I'd combine some of the concepts and work them into a boot I actually did like. Below are the three design I liked best. All three are pretty similar to boots that already exist though I think actually drawing them significantly helped me visualize them more accurately in 3D.

Three preferred boot designs.

As you can see from the first two I decided to make the last boot of the three. As for my reasoning; even though (Ultimate) Red Skull has taken the cloned body of Captain America in the comics I found the first boot too 'American' and too "in your face" for the passive aggressive style Red Skull applies to his tactics. The second boot looks too much like actual Nazi shoe wear; something I am actively trying to avoid. It's not that I don't like the Nazi boot; quite the opposite actually. It's just that 3D Total's rendition (to be found in an older blog post or simply Google it) features the same kind of boots and I want my version of Red Skull to be viewed and judged independently.

Kind regards,
Pim