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AJ's doodley doodles


ajz3d
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Oh man! That's a little late comment,

but your pistol model is soooo cool!

It's the kind of model that I'd like to sculpt for real.

It is not that I like weapons; I like the attention to details

like the patterns on the grip. Wow. Great piece!

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That's it. The final test. ;)

 

yet_another_one_of_those_endless_tests.j

 

But... I have another item coming in to complete the composition. The Noctua CPU cooler/radiator. Awaiting to be textured in 3D-Coat:

 

noctua_clay_render_01.jpg?dl=1

 

Nice renders.  I have that cooler on my setup, right now...it's a beast.

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Thank you guys for your kind comments. :)

 

What did you use to make the tubing on that cooler?

 

I'm also very curious about how you made those fan blades.

For all tube shaped objects I used sweep SOP.

A single blade was made with three curves and a skin SOP which then underwent some additional modelling (extrusion, loops, etc.) and was ultimately radially duplicated nine times.

 

Time to start a long texturing session. :brush:

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Amazing renders and great textures. Do you use 3d coat only for textures? Nvil for modeilng and Houdini for render/sim ? It seems to be not ordinary choice of software...

Hey many thanks Jose. In this particular project I'm indeed using 3D-Coat only for textures.

I know that this combination of programs might seem very unusual, but I feel extremely comfortable with it. NVil is super-slick when it comes to traditional modelling (subdivision modelling in this case), 3D-Coat is fantastically intuitive and fast when dealing with UV unwrapping and texturing (sculpting tools are also top-notch!). Houdini's non-destructive node-based nature enables me to introduce even deepest changes very quickly without loosing too much time to accommodate them upstream. Not to mention it has an AWESOME production-ready renderer and full set of high-end VFX treats.

If only 3D-Coat fully supported UDIM, the pipeline would be ideal for me. I'm loosing A LOT of production time (hours - depending on the complexity of the project) just to deal with workarounds for certain 3D-Coat problems in this department, and some other silly bugs. ;) It's sad to say, but it's always 3D-Coat where I have to solve the most problems. Nevertheless, I love to work in it. :wub: Though I can't help but notice, that 3D-Coat has been initially developed mostly with real-time engines in mind.

Edited by ajz3d
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Thank you guys for your kind comments. :)

 

For all tube shaped objects I used sweep SOP.

A single blade was made with three curves and a skin SOP which then underwent some additional modelling (extrusion, loops, etc.) and was ultimately radially duplicated nine times.

 

Time to start a long texturing session. :brush:

 

 

Aha, a Houdini guy, a Houdini guy that models with it no less, no mean accomplishment.

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Ya, still learning, and Houdini's exceptionally hard to learn, but... it feels good. ;)

 

Different lighting conditions:

 

noctua_different_lighting_conditions.jpg

 

The reason behind only two radiator ribs (a "common-rib" and a "terminator-rib") being present in those 3D-Coat renders is that those guys are going to be instanced in Houdini before the final render. Each one of them not only packs a heavy polycount, due to their saw-like edges, but they also take up 2k map each. So instead of making 84 2k UDIM tiles, which I'm sure only a few computer systems on this planet would handle (and none of them, most definitely, belongs to me), I decided that this would be a better way to approach the problem. :)

 

What puzzles me is the severe difference between the shading of the lustreless surface of the aluminium surface of the ribs in those two lighting conditions. On the left side it's almost black (Ennis probe), on the right side, it nearly has the colour of the sky of the HDR environment map - while it should keep more or less light gray colour in both lighting conditions (with a slight tint of the envmap). I probably need to experiment more with the aluminium. But there's a similar problem with this "creamy" plastic. The hue changes a lot when compared to the brown plastic of the fans. Strange. I'm not sure if it's only some setting in the render room or a more deeper problem.

Maybe someone could shed some light in department? ;)

 

PS. Don't pay too much attention to the dark splotches on the plastics in the upper left corner of the middle fan. I think they're some kind of artifacts generated by shadow maps in the render room.

Edited by ajz3d
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Speaking of Houdini and the Noctua model - a curiosity (general picture of the networks), for those who are interested:
 

houdini_noctua_preparations.jpg?dl=1

 

Let not the complexity of the networks fool you. It was very straightforward to build. But what's most important, the network is pretty darn flexible, providing that UVs are made for each object as soon as possible.

Sorry for mentioning Houdini so much in my recent posts, but I'm incredibly impressed by its capabilities.

Edited by ajz3d
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Apart from the official videos and 3rd party tutorials that SideFX has to offer on their main page, I mostly learn from the stuff posted by the gurus on SideFX and ODForce forums.

There are also a bunch of cool tutorials on YouTube that helped me here, for example when it comes to occlusion baking (just search for "Houdini occlusion baking" or something like that, or PM me if you don't find it - I always write everything I learn about Houdini in my notebook ;)).

I'd like to know how to bake curvature though. Because apparently 3D-Coat's curvature baking has problems when dealing with sharp edges:

 

3d-coat_curvature.png?dl=1

Edited by ajz3d
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Here are the same objects as seen in the UV room. The curvature for the upper object (fan blade) calculated just fine, but for for the casing, with much sharper edge, it was calculated with flaws (as seen on my previous post):

 

curvature_wireframe_and_uv_seams.png?dl=

 

Is this a bug? Should I report it to Mantis?

Edited by ajz3d
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I haven't touched rigging in Houdini yet. I only gave the bones and skinning a glimpse.

If you say that it's more simpler and more direct than Maya's rigging, then it really has to be awesome. I've done a few character rigs in Maya in the past, maybe not too advanced, I admit, but the process of constructing them was pretty straightforward and quite intuitive.

Character setup and rigging is the next item on my Houdini checklist.

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Thanks. There was nothing wrong with the topology of the blades. At least I'm not aware of anything that might have been wrong with it. :) I had problems with the quality of curvature calculated by 3D-Coat for the casing of the second fan, but I decided to ignore it and simply went on with texturing.

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  • 4 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...
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Working on a Krite for the challenge made me to seek a lot of references about those insatiable E.T.s. During my search I stumbled upon an extremely well done short fan film made by Jordan Downey. If you're a Critters fan, get some popcorn and prepare for a Krite-Fest: :)

 

https://youtu.be/yloNnvdWBU0

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Check this out

Really awesome stuff. How did you dig this out?

As strange as it may sound from the lips of a person who does CGI for a living, I wholeheartedly love animatronics and I wish it was more frequently used in major film productions instead of CGI creatures. Whenever it's possible of course. High-tech animatronic creatures look and feel more believable than CGI ones. Well, most of the time. :) Oh how I wished that the guys behind the prequel to John Carpenter's "The Thing" used them instead of dropping the idea in favour of computer generated imagery (and they had the robots already done and ready for shooting!).

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Apart of fighting with my Intuos pressure issues in 3DC for the last two days, because of the fact that want to render my Krite in Mantra I've also been doing some preliminary SSS tests in this rendering engine to better understand how it works. The SSS setup (in mantra surface shader) is slightly different from Mental Ray's that I am accustomed to, but not by much.

The bust geometry and textures (color, normal map, displacement) are not mine and come from www.ir-ltd.net. Reflectivity, specular color and roughness is not mapped and therefore are uniform across the whole surface. For environment maps I used those supplied with 3D-Coat.

 

mantra_surface_shader_sss.jpg?dl=1

Edited by ajz3d
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  • 7 months later...
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Okay, I've managed to find some time to work on Mr. Blobby. The textures are almost done, but there's still the bottom side to be completed. I thought about skipping this part, but if I am to pose the poor sod laying on a table inside a cabin of some rough fishermen's boat, some textures must be applied there I think.

 

I'm really angry about that... that... sea mammal's tail I made, but... it may not be visible on a final render. :db:

 

Anyway, here's the current WIP progress. Nothing fancy, just some rendered angles from the built-in engine, no SSS or anything yet. Any comments, and especially hard critique, are very welcome:

Hi AJZ, how can I get your blobfish 3D model? Just to model him in styrofoam, gr. Patrick

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