Lay of the land…

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research lately at home and in work on a pipeline for realistic real-time terrain for games and have been evaluating a few applications for the workflow. That involves a bunch of test renders, import/export, bit depths, height maps and boring texture formats so I’ve had some fun putting together some renders of environments from my research. Created in GeoControl and Mudbox and rendered in 3dsmax using Mental Ray.

Full moon, class dismissed…

This Wednesday evening is the last class in the Mudbox course I’ve been teaching, and we’re looking at some lighting, compositing and presentation techniques. Hopefully my students should at this point have a nicely sculpted and textured werewolf head based on the provided base mesh. I’ve been doing some HDRI lighting tests in Mental Ray and Vray with the occasional pass from the Scanline (fresnel, volume light) and comping/post production in Photoshop.

There is still some further texture work to do and I’d like to add some proper hair in the weeks ahead, I’d also like to extend the model adding neck and shoulders – all depends on that elusive free time!

Werewolf head update…

Quick update to my werewolf head, tried some basic hair and fur at lunchtime in 3DSMax, added a hot and cold light, then added smoke and colour corrected in Photoshop. The students seemed to enjoy working on their versions at yesterday’s class, I’m looking forward to seeing what they produce over the next two sessions.

Mo’ Mud…

Here’s another quick Mudbox update, a work in progress sculpt I’ve been working on for my students. With just 3 classes left they will be given the base mesh and an ambient occlusion map generated from the high res sculpt and asked to approximate a target render. The youtube clip is grabbed from the realtime viewport in 3DSMax 2012.

Mudbox nights…

I mentioned in the last post that I have started to teach an evening class in the Irish School of Animation at BCFE. The last few classes had been kinda theory heavy, image bit depths for displacement maps and the differences between map types and whatnot so I really wanted to get the students back to hands-on sculpting this week, which is the most important part – finding a workflow technique that suits the artist’s own artistic style. I provided a base mesh, reference and textures plus some tips so that the students could hit the ground running in the limited time we have each week. In preparation I created 2 sculpts based on the same base mesh and textured them differently. Admittedly the black boot below took me about 4 hours as I had to create the base mesh and gather reference and didn’t “finish” it fully but the brown boot was created in less than 3. I have boosted the specular highlights in these real-time viewport renders grabbed straight from 3DSmax, the hardware shaders are composed of diffuse, specular and bump maps only, all 4k and painted in Mudbox.

Best viewed fullscreen at 720p

GDC highlight…

To quote many’s the casual blogger, “I haven’t posted in a while” – this has been due to a distinct lack of free time these past months. I’ve started teaching evening classes at the Irish School of Animation, “An Introduction to Mudbox” to be specific, which requires more preparation time than I had expected, there were no entry requirements this year so it takes careful thought to design a course that is suitably paced for beginners and those with some experience. I also attended the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco this year, mainly for the summits and tutorials, including the tech art bootcamp and roundtables from which I took away a lot and met some very interesting peers and people.

For me personally, I was especially glad to meet Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry of thechineseroom, and Robert Briscoe their art collaborator on the full release of earlier Source mod “Dear Esther“, a haunting, moving game experience that I highly recommend. Dear Esther deservedly picked up the IGF award for Excellence in Visual Arts. It’s probably not for hardcore Call of Duty fans (it dismisses many of the FPS conventions we are used to e.g. shooting and jumping, in favour of a slower paced, intellectual experience) but if you’ve ever wondered what else games can be then you can pick up this worthwhile experiment for €8 on Steam.

The 60 minute rock…

Happy New Year – first post of 2012! Another lunchtime challenge, this time to see if I could make some decent looking rocky crags in an hour using only basic geometry and procedural textures in 3DSMax. Organic rocks can be very difficult to get right, scale and detail can often be difficult to eyeball and procedural textures must be carefully nested to remove the obvious patterns of cellular noise. I started by extruding a wavy spline, cloning/offsetting the resulting mesh and then attaching them as editable polys, using the bridge feature to patch up the hole and connecting edges where appropriate to help regularise the topology for displacement.

I then instanced the mesh a few times, allowing it to overlap and not being too careful about placement. I rotated an instance and used it as a ground plane, again intersecting the vertical base meshes.

At this point I composed the image and locked off the camera. For lighting, I added a Mental Ray daylight system and turned on Final Gather using 2 bounces at draft settings. After playing with the sun position I ended up with this:

I used 3DSMax’s displacement modifier rather than Mental Ray’s excellent shader displacement for speed purposes – I needed to be able to see the results in the viewport rather than endlessly rendering and tweaking. I wanted the segmented bumpiness of a cellular procedural map but I knew this would look unnatural so I broke it up in a composite map by multiplying a smoke procedural map over it and playing with the size. This was applied using planar mapping.

This roughened up the base mesh pretty nicely:

Adding a turbosmooth below the displacement modifier to get some extra detail (one of the benefits of using procedural textures) gave me this:

Lastly as time was running out I needed a quick way of adding some variety to the diffuse colour, which I thought should be a canyon red. I tried some fresnel effects on the dry rock but none gave the effect I wanted, so I opted for an arch & design material with a Mental Ray landscape map for the diffuse. This allowed me to choose a reddish colour for the slopes and a lighter brownish-yellow for flatter areas, which should look dusty or sandy where sediment would collect. I then added a procedural smoke bump map for fine detail not captured by the displacement, leaving me with this:

The image was a bit washed out so I took it into Photoshop for some colour correction and enhanced the sky with a hint of cloud and an aeroplane contrail. I faked a little depth of field in the left bottom corner and added some noise. Here is the final image.