Project Evaluation

Personal development part 2 evaluation.

Second part of the personal development module gave me a great possibility to investigate some essential aspects of the 3D graphics. Critically looking at my 3D works I understood that I have to learn some very important things such as – complex modeling, sub-division, UV mapping, texturing, shading, lighting, rendering and fur. As soon as I got idea what I wanted to learn I started to think in which way I want to do it. After making some research I found out that all these things could be learnt on making one still 3D image. Immediately Krishna portrait appeared in my mind. Krishna personality attracts me a lot and his appearance so interesting that definitely could give me a good challenge. I have looked at different images of Krishna and picked those which gave me a good level of details. Some of the pictures I have used for making image planes and further modeling and other helped me a lot in understanding the shapes and the structures of certain elements. During the project development I met quite a few obstacles. In such cases I referred to the Digital Tutors, Gnomon, books and Jason. All of them gave me a great support in this project.

Even though the deadline for the personal development was moved further I still could not complete this project as I wanted. Initial idea was making it entirely in 3D, but by the end I found out that rather then just learning basics I had to go much further in shading and rendering which required much more time. Actually each of these aspects could be taken as a separate brief because of infinite depth they have. I still wanted to make this picture look aesthetic even I could not make it in Maya. That is where digital painting skill came in hand. Render which was done in Maya was painted over in Photoshop with garlands, hair, shadows and reflections.

I am still thinking to keep working on it in my own time, and investigate things that haven’t been completed.

Photoshop Retouch

For the last two days I was working on this picture trying to prepare it for submission.
I think that it looks much better thatn raw 3D model which I made in Maya.
There are still plenty of things that should go mo realistic. (as it always happens there is no limit for perefection, that is why I leave it as it is by now)Going to make a cup of tea for myself and celebrate complition of Personal Development brief :) Hare Krishna!

Finalizing

Due to the time I had to leave idea of exploring the fur shading and rendering features of the Maya. Each of those aspects requires much more time for investigation and could be taken as a separate brief.
I am still trying to make this picture look more aesthetic by retouching it in photoshop (adding some reflection, correcting the colors and etc.)

Ambient occlusion render

color render

combination of both

retouching in photoshop

Later on I want to paint some hairs as well :)

Ambient Occlusion 2

Once I have worked out how to make ambient occlusion on the simple primitives i tried to make it on my actual model. And what a surprice! mental ray doesn like my textures, it simple gives me and error mesagge saying this jpg. files are not recognizable. I have found a way around it by dublicating the scene and deleting all the materials and history of the objects (because of that i won't be able to work out if ambient occlusion works for bump maps, there are plenty of them on the crown body) Only then ambient occlusion worked well.

color

ambient occlusion

combination of both

makes a big difference to ornament elements.

Ambient occlusion

Today I have been messing around with ambient occlusion, trying to work how to use it. Want to show you some results :)

color render

ambient occlusion render

combination of both in photoshop

another example

Cloth

Just another step: clothes using nurbs curves and lofting them
Nurbs surfaces converted to polygons meshes and textured.

Sub-Divs

Some thoughts about sub-divisions.
Sub-division are quite effective in modeling organic things, if you need really smooth staff is the
good choice. But! :)
When you come to the point of texturing, you'll find it quite messy. So did I. It is really difficult to sort out UV for sub-division surfaces. Because of that I had to convert all my sub-divs to polygons in order to sort out textures. Jaison said that smoothed polygons requires less resources. Also he mentioned that mentalray has some problems in rendering sub-div. He showed me a sub-division proxy for polygon object, which could take you close to editing polygon as a sub-division.

sub-division proxy

bump mapping in progress

Yesterday I have staerted to make proper textures and bump maps for the crown. That's what I have got so far.

Actually when a see what could be done with bump map a start to realize, that propapbly I have done some extra modelling, half of the ornaments I have made, could be easily bump mapped. Especially bottom part with gems.

bump map test

Today I've spent a little bit of time investigating how to make crown looks nice. As you can see basic form is quite plain and looks boring, it asking me to put some ornaments on it :) Bump mapping is the way to do it.

So I have made a quick tester texture and bump map to see how it going to looks like.


result:
I think that is the way to do it, so I am starting to draw texture and bump map properly, to make it looks nice and clean.

UV Layout

I have started UV map my model. One more time I appreciated Digital Tutors video lessons :)

This is my first UV lay out for this model - time to learn from mistakes :) As you see this UV is not very smart, because is has some sews on the visible part of the model, which looks very bad when you make your texture a bit grainy, a line appears along all the border, we don't need that, so we make another UV from scratch :)

In this case I have made visible crown and neck jewelery and tried to organize UV sews that they would be under them, so they would not be invisible.
I haven't touched a jewelery yet, it s going to be a next step, after sorting out textures on the head.

That's new UV layout with some textures painted on it.

That's how it look on the model.

Time is going:

And we got some results, which I am quite happy with :)
What do You think?




Modeling is coming to the end, though there are quite few thing have to be done. This week Iam planing to finish up modeling and move to the next step - texturing (haven't done it properly before, so going to learn it)

How Iam going to do it?

It is right time to use the book called Maya character animation, which I have bought last year from Amazon,(was waiting for delivery about 2 months:)

As I mentioned in my statemetn of intent I am am going to learn Sub-div modelling, so I found appriopriate section, qute good and straightforward tutorial how to model a head (exactly what Iam going for):

Time to model.

So we get a general idea how to do it, its time to start:
For the beginning we play with sub-divs to learn general principles:




Well, seems to be working :)

It is time to start making something closer to truth. Using images I have found earlier I have made image planes that I need for modeling:

Front image plane

Side image plane

Crown front plane

Crown ornament front image plane

Using this planes we quite effectevily start to create general 3D models:





Iam getting excited, because I haven't done anything similar to this :)

Sketches

I have chosen these images as a main reference for designing my 3D model. At all these pictures Krishna is the same age and has similiar dress and jewelerries.






Looking at the images I tried to portray characteristic feature of the Krishna - eyes, moth, nose, jewellery etc. Here are some of these sketches: