Strange Aeons

zBrush and Nergal

ironfacewilly — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:12:47 +0000

ive been trying out zBrush last couple days and it looks good so far. ive mainly just played around with some different tools and only tried to seriously make one thing with it at this point, and that is the character i created last year for Ian’s class. Ive decided i want to call the character Nergal (previous name “Azotep” didnt feel right to me). Nergal was a lesser deity of Sumeria, hes Lord of the Underworld, although he seems to not hold true power over that realm.

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Texturing

ironfacewilly — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:41:53 +0000

renders of some texturing i did today… stupid glass, doesnt know its supposed to be see thru
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Mad Max model

ironfacewilly — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:38:10 +0000

just posting some recent renders. not new actual assignment stuff to show, other than the spotlight which will be in the final assignment. the v8 interceptor is something i started over the weekend.
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Making AO and Wireframe Shaders

ironfacewilly — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 04:53:02 +0000

i still forget how to do this and always end up referring to simons tutorials from last year or looking for new ways to do it. I think for the mothman model i used the vector render method for the wireframe. but i prefer the way simon showed us, i guess its easy to forget because we only did it the once and right at the end of the year. so i decided to write out the steps and take screen shots to help me remember how to do it, then i thought i’d post it up on here since it’ll look neater on the blog than in a word document.

Create Ambient Occlusion Shader
1. In the Hypershade, create a new Surface Shader, rename to AMB_OCC_Shader. Select the renamed shader and go to Graph>Input and output Connections to show everything in the work area.

2. Then find “mib_amb_occlusion node” and drag it into the work area. Middle mouse click the AO node and drag it onto AMB_OCC_shader. Select “Other”.

3. in the Connection Editor, on the left side, highlight “outValue”. On the right side, highlight “outColor” and close the Connection Editor.

4. Select AMB_OCC_shader and in the Attribute Editor set “Samples” to 128 or 256, “Spread” 1 to 5 and “Max Distance” 1 to 5.

5. Apply material to object and Render.

Render The Wireframe
1. First duplicate AMB_OCC_shader and rename it to wireframe. Select Shader Group (if it is not visible, select Wireframe shader, then Graph>Input and Output Connections).

2. Now in the Attribute Editor, find the Mental Ray section and then find “Contours”. turn on “Enable Contour Rendering” and set “Color” to black and “Width” to 0.5.

3. Now open the Render Settings, make sure Mental Ray is selected and go to the Features tab. look for the Contours section and turn on “Enable Contour Rendering”, set “Over-Sample” to 3.

4. Look for “Draw By Property Difference” (just beneath Contours in Render Settings/Features) and turn on “Around All Poly Faces”.

5. Apply wireframe shader to object and Render.

Baking Ambient Occlusion To Texture
1. Before baking, ensure that a project is properly setup, the object is UV unwrapped, the normals are facing the correct direction and edges are hard or soft as needed.

2. With Rendering selected go to Lighting/Shading>Batch Bake option box. Ensure that “Use bake set override” is ticked, “Color Mode” is set to Occulation, X, Y Resolution and File Format are set to the required output. Setting Final Gathering to maximum will give better results.

3. Press Convert and Close to Bake texture. The baked texture can be found in the projects renderData/mentalray/lightMap folder.

3D Atlantean Sword model

ironfacewilly — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:44:20 +0000

ive been working on game model of the Atlantean Sword from the Conan the Barbarian movie (original), its not finished, but getting there.

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Pixelation Loop

ironfacewilly — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 10:56:08 +0000

ive wanted to do this since cookies class last year, seeing niall’s pixelation reminded me of that. so last weekend we went out and tried it out. its just something simple that shows what you can do with pixelation.

AIE – Animatic Assignment

ironfacewilly — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:48:12 +0000

ok so i never got around to posting those storyboards… sue me, ive pretty much finished with my part of the animatic now. its all rendered out and ready for submission and it was pretty fun to make once i’d gotten into it. i added a few more shots as needed to flesh out the story abit more, such as showing the dragon in pain and getting angry as well as another climbing shot, a close up shot of the hero character when he notices the dragon approaching and a shot from the dragons perspective as it moves into position for battle. i threw some music by Chaos Theory as well because i thought it would go well with the scene. so this is all of my part of the assignment, i think brad still has some work to do and pete hasnt shown up all week, so he’s prolly yet to begin animating. but i might post the entire finished short movie later on…

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AIE – Environment Assignment

ironfacewilly — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:44:50 +0000

rendering these things was a pain in the ass, the final beauty version took 21 hours and 47 minutes to render at 3508 x 2480 (A4 dimensions) and 300 resolution. i added in a few extra details after i;’d realized the first beauty render was at 72 resolution and wouldnt be enough, added some random bricks around here and there, mostly in the water. i made some cobwebs to place in the foreground which wasnt sure i’d like, but i think they add to the scene alot. the last addition was the shape of a rat, with just a dark lambert shader placed on the bridge. so thats another assignment finished, im fairly proud of this scene. also we’ve been doing story boards for the animatic, i can post those up seperately tomorrow.

AIE – Environment Assignment update

ironfacewilly — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:11:04 +0000

im pretty behind with the assignment now, a virus had been plaguing my computer and causing it to restart a short time after i open up a internet browser. its really frustrating because i would have finished it by now. i slept in this morning and so i missed the explanation of the new assignment. it seems to be a group project to make a short animatic movie of 5 min duration. we’ll be submitting movie plots by the end of the class day. anyway, heres the last render i managed to make for my environment, lighting is pretty much done and i still need to the actual render passes, OC, z depth, etc before i can submit.

AIE – Environment Assignment Update

ironfacewilly — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:01:09 +0000

i thought id post some test renders i made yesterday before going to bed. i still have to sort out the reflectivity before i move on to lighting and then rendering.

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