Banana Anyone.......Complete!

Yesterday, I promised to give you an update on my banana texture which I was demoing for our students.

There are a few things I want to tweak a bit more but for my first ever time painting a banana skin I think that it came out pretty well!

Here it is...

The completed banana as of yesterday afternoon.

The completed colour texture map.

Banana Anyone?

I sometimes look at what I do in a day and think this is strange. Today is one of those days!

At the moment I am teaching texturing at South Seas. Today we have been looking in great detail at banana's, each of our students for homework had to find and bring one in and analyse what makes a banana look like a banana.

They then have to paint a texture for a 3D banana and infuse all of the gathered banana essence into their textures. All the while I have been demoing the process to them. 

Here is my results so far, I will update again at the end of the day with the final result of a days worth of texturing!

I love animation...

Progress render.

and here is the colour UV map so far.

Progress Colour UV Map.

Quick Update

I have been kept extremely busy at work of late getting ready for the next series of classes that I will be teaching. As always I have also been hard at work creating new teaching resources and improving the resources we already have.

The latest piece that I have completed is a new texture for our "Big Guy" rig which we use during the key animation module. This is a close up head and shoulders version that can be used for facial acting and dialogue. For his texture I have gone for a more feature quality look which I am quite happy with.

The spaceman rig is also now officially complete after a few small bugs found during testing phase. I am also happy to report that he is now an official South Seas animation rig which will be used during classes and he will also be the star of the school short film project this year!

I am super excited about this development and for one cant wait to see the short start production or see the animation that our students will be creating with him.

In the mean time I will still be animating with him in my spare time, so keep you eyes peeled for more updates to come.


BigGuy Bust from Geoff Ind on Vimeo.

Future Projects...

Hello everyone,

I am still waiting on my Spaceman character's rig to be completed by my rigging guru. I have been working with Dan closely to ensure that all of his controls allow for a really wide range of expression and character. So far the rig is looking uber cool. I just cant wait to get into posing, which should be happening very soon. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

In the mean time while I wait, I have been really busy at South Seas preparing for the next set of classes I am teaching with our first year group. I have also been mulling over a few sequences that I want to use my new rig in. I'm nearly there with a few idea's and I'll start boarding it up on paper soon.

I have also been steadily adding a few more projects to the list of things that I can move on to when the spaceman is complete. In my last post I shared a character design that I want to develop more and use in a short story that my wife and I came up with. I also recently designed another character that I hope to learn more about rigging for character animation with (mainly because he is very simple rig wise). Hopefully if I pick up more of the rigging process I can get more of my characters ready for animation in the future.

Anyway here he is!


Snail Turnaround from Geoff Ind on Vimeo.

Tortoise Character design and Digital Painting

At the moment my spaceman character is currently being rigged for animation by a rigger extraordinaire. I am really looking forward to moving him around and giving him some character! I hope to have the rig in my hands soon but in the mean time I thought I'd share a character design I painted up late last year with you. 

I initially designed him for a short film Idea that my wife and I came up with. I still may get back into developing our idea further but for the time being it has been put on a shelf until I have more time to devote to a larger more fully realised short film.

Tortoise Orthographic views.

I really like his shell, especially the dimension that the segmented shapes give it. Hopefully I can find the time to develop him a bit more and them translate him into the 3D world!

Take care,

Geoff.

Spaceman Texturing Complete

Hello everyone, texturing for my spaceman character is now complete! 

After an intense 28 hours, spread out over the last 6 days. I have finally completed the textures for all of his various bits and bobs. I am really happy with the result and I have learned heaps about how to make really high quality textures for a character.

The spaceman character ended up having a whopping 38 separate painted texture maps, each of them controlling a different aspect of of his separate materials. From the metal parts around his ears to the skin of his face, each distinct piece has to have a several texture map's to control how the material reacts to light and shadow and looks in the final render.

I have completed a turnaround render of the character in his default T-pose overnight, so that I can see how his textures react to movement. This allows me to tweak his textures a little further and adjust any problems that a still render does not reveal.


Textured Spaceman Turnaround from Geoff Ind on Vimeo.

Because of the turnaround render I could see that the specular of his fabric skullcap was reacting more like a reflective paint surface and did not have enough variation between the black nylon material and the white mesh material. As a result I have created a new specular map and fixed up the problem. 

I am also not really loving the way the glass of the helmet looks, so I think further research and tweaking is called for to finesse the material attributes a bit more.

Rigging is also now underway which means I should have be able to start injecting character into him very soon, I can't wait!

Geoff.

Fresh eyes

Howdy everyone!

Today I wanted to say a few words about the importance of "Fresh Eyes". 

What I mean by fresh eyes is the phenomenon that most artists experience of becoming slowly blinded to the flaws and mistakes of a project over time. This usually happens when you have been spending long periods of time working on an image or, in my case model.

I recently experienced an acute case of "blindness" while I was painting the texture for the Chest pack of my spaceman character. Yesterday I posted my progress on the colour map of my model after painting heaps of detail around the edges of wear and tear. I was pretty pleased with it at the time and had become blinded to the (I realise now) pretty clear flaws in the texture. 

Fortunately a good mate sent me a message praising my efforts (you know who you are, thanks for the critique!), after he had done praising me, I ask for his frank appraisal of my work.....

I got back a 3 paragraph concise description of what was lacking in the render and therefore needed to do more work!

After I had, had a quick cry. I took another hard frank look at my render and I had to agree that all of the areas that my friend had pointed out where completely correct and on the money.

For those of you who have not yet seen yesterday's post, here is where it was; as of 5pm yesterday.

Yesterdays flawed render.

After a day of work to address the notes that I had recieved, here is where it is now.

New and vastly improved render.

The lighting in the image has not changed at all, all of the improvement in the colours and textures are a result of lots of tweaking to the shader and the texture maps.

And with out further ado here is a breakdown of the suggestions I received, the main areas of concern are marked in the origional image in green:

Areas where more work on the textures and shader where needed.

A - The collar that the helmet attaches to was a bit bland in the original render. Admittedly I had not yet started to think about it as I had been concentrating on getting the shell of the chest pack textured and had been pouring all of my efforts in that area.

As a result I have now separated the shell from the collar using a layered shader. Using the same method as the shading network for the body is set up. The Shell has a Blinn material and the Collar is using a Phong material with a tonne of facing ratio!

B - The feedback on this area of the render was;

"Taking some of the scratches towards the edge so that its not so uniform along all the the edges, currently goes, scratch marks > space of good paint > scratch marks." 

I had completely overlooked this. I had been working on the assumption that there was a groove running along the gap inbetween each of the panels of the shell. My thinking at the time was that the paint would have been protected in these areas resulting in less wear. Looking at it again this morning, I realised that my friend was right. It was far too uniform and needed more chaos and randomness around all of the edges.

C - The specular also needed some love, I received the following little tidbit;

"Breaking up your specular as well with some noise of some sort (not just with the bump) could be a bit of an extra tidbit. So the healthy texture has some irregular specular as well."

To get rid of the CG'ness of the specular I have broken it up using a custom painted texture that is a little more grainy than just a flat uniform colour. As my friend has suggested I have also added heaps of subtle bump information which I had not yet gotten to at the time. In the end I have used 3 bump maps, one for a nice grainey bump texture all over, one to raise the level of the stripes of paint and lastly one to create the groves for all of the main scratches and dings in the metal surface.

The last little bit of feedback I got was on the properties of the material itself;

"Not sure if the pack is metal or plastic? or metallyplastic? or plasticy metal? lol but if its more metally you could maybe reduce difffuse and push up spec a bit so theres more contrast. but sometimes alot of those properties are light driven."

Again I had glossed over the fact that my material really did not look like it was made of any definative element. All I had to do here was to tweak the specular sliders and bit and hey presto it was looking more like a painted metal surface.

I am lucky in that I have several people who I look up to and ask for criticism and advice on making my art better. 

If you don't have anyone like that then another good way of getting "Fresh Eyes" on a project is to down tools and get out and about for a few hours or even as long as overnight. When you do get back to the project you will find that you will be able to see most of the flaws in your work.

If you are working on a 2D piece of art then a handy trick I have learned is to flip you canvas around, or to look at your drawing from the back (through the page) this also has the effect of changing your perspective on the image and giving you those "Fresh Eyes".
 
I hope to have all of the texturing completed at some point tomorrow (I have a day off because it is ANZAC day here in NZ) so, yay I get to spend more time getting this guy looking even cooler!

Lastly I would like to say a big thank you to everyone (you know who you all are!) who has been giving me good constructive feedback and encouragement, it means heaps to me to be able to push myself beyond where I have gotten before and better myself at my craft.

As always thanks to everyone for reading, and keep your eyes peeled for more updates.

Take care,

Geoff