Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

Very quick post showing the starts to a new project I'm working on. This is based on the current on demand workshop I bought from Zbrushworkshops. You can find the specific course here.

After a very quick play last week trying to get used to Maya again I managed to create a rough jacket and got it working in Zbrush (see below). I decided to start again from the start with a project in mind.

The project I have chosen is to do a 3d representation of Inquisitor Eisenhorn from the novels/40k universe. The reason for this is the complex clothing (in the concept art by Clint Langley he wears 3 layers of jackets!) as well as plenty of smaller items on the concept art which have their own techniques.

I've started blocking out the pieces as the workshop recommends (I'm using Maya. not Softimage but the principles in all 3D packages should be roughly the same).





 As I'm not going to be using it for game art I've been doing some tests with using just flat geometry (instead of thickening/ adding geometry in Maya for the inside of each bit of clothing). Once imported in to Zbrush and subdivided provided it is all one polygroup you can use Panel loops with a thickness to create the inside/ clothing thickness.

Here is the first test using the collar piece (the head is just an old head bust I did just to test scale). Aside from the bevel which I need to change I was happy with the result.


The plan is to get this fully finished by Christmas although depends on work schedule. Next weekend I should get the boots and inner+main jacket. Then after importing will pose, then re-import in to Maya to roughly model the outer jacket.

Looking through my old footage on my laptop I found some test shots of my Final Year Project at university and I thought I'd put them on here so that I can compare my lighting techniques after learning some new tricks and techniques later.

My final year project was based around mainly using fluid particles to make a glass of water turn in to a flower (well a flower growing from the water). I knew I was going to be shooting it on just a black background as I was wanting to emulate the slow motion Sainsbury's food adverts that were out a few years ago. Lighting was obviously going to be one of the key things I looked at as I needed to make it efficient and yet still look good. For this I decided not to use caustics as the was no solid background for light to reflect to. Then I created a simply lighting rig using grids with a white or gray Lambert texture on them, hiding their primary ray visibility in the render and then using final gather. This cut the render times down by a great deal without the need of global illumination/caustics and gave me the ability to create a nice studio lighting setup using grids as reflected lights and reflectors themselves.

I don't remember the exact render times but they were at most 2-3 minutes each per frame. The only troubles I had were actually with using XSI and Realflow together. I made a decision at the time to stick with the package I knew as opposed to which had better fluid/Realflow integration and it caused some pretty nasty glitching problems during the render phase.

Here are a couple of test videos of the petals growing, hopefully the video compression on here doesn't make them look too bad. Unfortunately I don't have the final render/shot on this laptop but I was going to re-render it or infact reshoot it completely using Maya to make the most out of it.

This will be a weekly or bi-weekly update of my current projects/ideas in development. I've decided to do this to keep me busy and give myself own personal deadlines which I think is important in order to maintain healthy motivation/pressure.

3D Modelling:
Currently learning some core modelling techniques from a tutorial researched at university. The goal is to build a simple Android model. I'm following the tutorial exactly here before I deviate away too soon. I think learning core 3D skills again will help me show off the areas I want to concentrate in (lighting/rendering/particles).
After this I'm going to do a few simple car tutorials and make the generic car model as a studio lighting and render test. While I could just use a premade model I don't think it will hurt to learn some extra modelling skills with this.

Mini Project Idea:
I want to use the techniques learned to create a 3D version of the image below. It will provide some modelling and lighting challenges and yet not be too complex to be impossible for me.