Anna's bathroom update

Hello everyone; apologies for not posting anything for ages, spent the last few weeks animating and sorting out render passes.

I painted some dirt for the boy's clothes and face, and added some more bump maps here and there,- hopefully my lack of lighting experience does not take away from the result.. I changed the outside wall colour from beige to red-brown since it was too similar to the boy's skin colour. I may also need to tone down the shadows and the picture frame, though it kind of gives an idea of what will follow.

Final output will be 720x576, my textures vary from 6 to 14MB depending on the scale of the objects on screen. I have a few moving camera shots, I think the bump on the bathroom walls may cause some funky flickering, since it is the only element im using ambient occlusion on, I guess increasing the anti-aliasing will sort that.

More bathroom shots to come!

Dan Biker/Dog combo

Hi All,

Just been mucking around with lighting and textures for a while so I thought I would put up a bit of a work on progress. The lighting is not final but I do think that I would like to keep it on the darker side..........for me it just seems to work for the character. All comments and crits would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Dan

NB. Obviously, there is no dog in these images yet.........that is kind of my next step. I have also decided to sack off Final Gathering for this render as it is taking too long and the results are pretty average.

Ritchie-medusa

Thanks Alwyn, thats great! Have a good bank holiday weekend.

Medusa

Hi Ritchie.

Your Medusa is looking awesome. I can see your problem, and I'm wondering if you can use zBrush? If you can, then you'll be able to do the texture, spec and displacement for your Medusa easily.
The other option is painting the seems out in bodypaint, which has some great tools for this type of thing. If you go down that road, I would look at laying the UVs out with 5-8 snakes in one UV space, paint your textures giving each snake the variation you want, then overlap the remaining snake UVs on top. You can move then around giving more variation in the overall appearance. After you've done that, you'll have to take it into Bodypaint or some other 3d paint package and paint out the seems.
Hope this helps.
C
a~

Ritchie - Medusa

Hello Alwyn! Thanks for agreeing to this blog its good of you, sorry I haven't posted sooner. Hope you can help, the snakes on this medusa project have been driving me mad!! I've run into numerous problems but the main one is the seams where the snakes join to the head. Could you give me some advice on how I can go about matching the Displacement/bump and colour at the joins. I was thinking of doing the map for one snake and copying it onto a 4k map accross 26 snakes then varying them slightly. However doing the same with the displacement or bump and making the seams align to the head is a bit tricky. I'm thinking of putting each snake in their own uv space and generating maps for each, then I will have to asign a separate cluster and material for each snake. If you have any advice on this as well as how you would approach creature texturing I would be very greatful! Thankyou.

Hi Anna,

The thing that is going to make this work is definitely pushing that stylised look. I'm liking the warping in the geometry, the textures you've kept a fairly neutral colour with the exception of the two characters which is good, it's not too busy and your eyes gets drawn to the characters.
As for the wet look on the Octopus, I wouldn't be trying to get a 'realistic' wet look as such, what you're doing with the specular highlight is good, but I would bring the bump a bit, just to break up the highlights, and to get a feel that there is a texture underneath. If fact, looking at your renders I would bring the bump up on nearly everything, its all quit smooth.

For the cloth, find a piece of fabric or old cloth that has a fairly course texture and scan it. Use this to make a good bump (make it seamless) and really exaggerate this on your cloth...remember you're going for a stylized look, not realistic, so be bold with your detail.

What resolution is your final output?

C
a~

Alwyn's Profile

Hi guys,

I just wanted to give you some background information on myself and where I've come from.

I'm currently working at MPC as a Senior Texture Artist on 'Prince of Caspian', which is the follow on feature film to 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. I've been there since January, previous to that I was working in Toronto, on a CG feature called 'Everyone's Hero', a cute kids movie that was only released in North America. I spent two years in Canada.
Before that I was at Animal Logic in Australia working on commercials and other feature films, such as House of Flying Daggers, Harry Potter and Farscape to name just a few.

I enjoy traveling, surfing and having a good laugh.

I look forward to seeing more of your work as it comes through.

Cheers
Alwyn