I'm an fan of sushi, especially Salmon (at least the ones from Sushi King). Considering I have never use SSS (subsurface scattering) to do food before, I sat my ass down and fired up Lightwave3D to see how far I can go. The result can be observed below...
It took 2 hours to render on my I5 quad core machine, the culprit being the SSS shader on the sushi and the DOF.
I also did some color correction and minor paintover in Photoshop.
Another greeting email that I have just sent off to the clients and vendors.
Surface details are implemented via displacement maps at rendertime. That's why you can't see them in this wireframe screenie.
Started out as a simple experiment to see if I can do a realistic mooncake. Then I thought what the hell. Fired up a render, did a bit of photoshopping, and sent it out.
Ever wanted to hold your 3D creations in your hands? There is rapid prototyping aka 3D printing which has became more affordable over the years. But if you still can't muster up the cash for those services (let alone buy one of those machines which costs at least $ 30,000 USD a piece for the lower end ones), you can always turn to papercraft, which only requires a printer, mastery in 3D modeling and paper-folding.
First, make a model in your favourite 3D program. There are certain rules to follow when modeling for paper. As each polygons represent a folded surface, you want to avoid tiny polygons unless you have tiny fingers to fold them. This depends greatly on you intended size for the final product.
3D model created in Lightwave in 15 minutes.
After you are satisfied with your 3D model, load up Pepakura, a software that unfolds your 3D models and lays them out in templates for printing. If you are new to Pepakura, chances are that you will have to go back to your 3D model several times to fix stuffs that isn't working. In Pepakura, you can define the output size, how the model should be cut and the size / shape of the flaps (small surface extensions that is used to glue the separate surfaces together). Pretty straightforward, really.
Three A4 size pages generated by Pepakura.
Once you have the template generated, all that's left to do is to print them out and cut out the shapes. The tedious part (or fun, depending on how bored you are that particular day) is folding and gluing the shapes into it's 3D parts.
The final product is about 15 cm tall. Some parts looked "sorry" because the surfaces where tiny and difficult to fold, and we used cellophone tapes instead of glue to put it together. Notice the lack of the bell on his collar and his missing tail.
Phoebe, god bless her incredibly patient soul, took care of most of the physical work after the printing. This paper Doraemon now stands proudly on my desk.
For more impressive feats of papercraft using Pepakura, follow this link (literally).
Was trying out some NPR (Non-PhotoRealistic) methods to render planets. Lightwave3D ships with several cel shaders, though I usually work with Super Cel Shader and BESM (BigEyesSmallMouth). Despite their respective limitations, they produce some pretty good results with minimal tweaking.
BESM gives you more control, but doesn't play well with textures (in fact, it totally ignores it) while Super Cel Shader has less controls and does not render edges.
If you are feeling adventurous, you can even fiddle with the node system to get you own custom cel shader, though I have little success in that aspect.
Other than the big honking watermark in the middle, the map of the planet was created entirely from procedural textures. The node system is a monster to learn, but it is already established that the degree of freedom it offers is enormous compared to pre-node versions.
This is just the node view. In each of the color nodes are layer upon layers of procedural textures and mattes.
Because I was aiming for a NPR result, I can settle with less amount of surface details compared to photoreal textures. Using procedurals mean I won't have to worry about texture pixelation, though I won't imagine going too near to the surface as there is not much detail to keep the close-ups interesting.
At long last, the first teaser trailer of James Cameron's Avatar is released on apple.com . For those not in the know, there has been a lot of anticipation for Cameron's upcoming masterpiece. Judging from the reaction of those lucky enough to attend a screening of a short clip some few weeks ago, for good reason too.
Inferring from the tidbits of information found on the Internet, and from the teaser trailer, the story is about a crippled soldier (Sam Worthington) who has his consciousness transferred to a blue alien being, or an avatar. As to why they did that I'm not sure, but like Titanic there is suppose to be an epic love story with another female alien amidst a war between the aliens and the humans.
Considering the significant quality jump between their previous open movie projects: Elephants Dream (The Orange Project) and Big Buck Bunny (The Peach Project), I'll be eagerly following this new endeavor. Looks like this time around they will be going for a action-packed fantasy setting.
On a side note, Blender is shaping up to be a fantastic production tool.
On another side note, The working title is making me crave for durian.
Recently I came across a simple but cool little app called ngplant designer, an L-system implementation that is programmed specifically to generate 3D trees and plants.
The app is simple enough and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Just spend a few minutes with it and you'll be churning out trees in record time.
The resulting mesh can be exported as an OBJ file to be imported to the 3D app of your choice. The UVs are readily laid out so all you have to do is slap on the texture images with some minor tweaks to further tailor it to your heart's content. While it is perfectly capable of modeling leaves as well, it does slow down dramatically when you reach a certain level of branching, yet the leaves density is still not quite there yet. So I imported the mesh and used the branchs' vertices to clone cardboard leaves , duplicating to achieve the desired density.
The trees above took around 10 minutes each from ngplant to rendering in Lightwave3D, complete with textures and leaves
For no apparent reason, I was overcame by an urge to do some miniature renders. So, I dug up some Homeworld 2 game models which were extracted from the game and converted by Fabio from Foundation 3D, place some props in the scene and rendered away.
Hiigaran Interceptor
Hiigaran Scout
Vaygr Bomber
For the uninitiated, Homeworld 2 is a space based RTS game released in 2003. Despite it's age, their ship designs are still one of my favourites.
Just finished modeling yesterday, textured and rigged today. Can't reveal what it is for just yet, hopefully soon it can be seen somewhere else other than this blog. For now, just enjoy the watermarked render below.
Another outstanding piece of work by Blur for Star Wars - The Old Republic, to be shown at E3 this year.
I can't quite put my finger on it, maybe it's the character designs or the lighting, but there seems to a distinct quality to Blur's works that makes it scream "Blluuurrr!". In a good way, of course.
If JJ Abrams's Trek film is anything to go by, our future is blindingly shiny.
I'm glad to say that this latest Star Trek reboot is, in many ways, superior than its predecessors. It had a good plot, a great cast (Simon Pegg was funny as hell, by the way), exciting space battles, fantastic visual effects and to top it all up, it features an orgy of anamorphiclens flare!
lens flare!
more lens flare!
lens flare on the bridge!
...and of course, on the title too!
Bear in mind these screenshots were taken from the trailer only. If you watched it carefully, you'll see that almost every shot had a lens flare in it.
Apparently, JJ Abrams opted for a shooting style that calls for a spotlight to be pointed at the camera whenever possible, and ILM was only too glad to obliged with an arsenal of new tools to simulate realistic lens flare in their VFX shots. You know...like Transformers, only more.
As a fellow CG artist, let me say that the CGI lens flares were very well done. I simply found it ironic and amusing that so much effort went into developing an effect that the CGI community once denounced as a hallmark of amateur work.
If you have played games since the early 90s, you'd probably have heard of the Star Wars X-wing series of games by LucasArts. One of the most prominent props in those game was this squarish, uninteresting 6 polygon prop known simply as a container.
screenie from the X-wing Alliance game.
Nonetheless, I spent so much game time blowing up these unremarkable yet surprisingly resilient boxes they became lodged in my memory, and with time became an inexplicable urge to model the damn thing.
Obviously this is just my own intepretation. Didn't take too long to make it, but it was a fun, if not nostalgia-filled, way to utilize my downtime.
Point you browser here to experience some pretty awesome technology at work, and it's all in Flash! You'll need a webcam, preferable a mic and of course, the latest version of Flash player. Just follow the instructions on the website.
If you are one of those unfortunate bunch who doesn't have a webcam, you'll just have to settle with the demo video below:
The application is basically a very interesting way to use glyph tracking technology (If you haven't realize, the square symbol is the glyph). You don't even have to print out the symbol; I simply took a picture of the glyph on my phone's camera and displayed it to the webcam.
According to the youtube page, this reel was created by certain Colin Sanders who recently graduated from UOIT's (University of Ontario Institute of Technology) game development programme, and was apparently pretty pissed due to the ineptness of his professor(s) who failed to teach him anything useful.
This video has since made it's round in the CG community, making Mr Sanders here famous of all the wrong reasons, if he is in fact looking for a career in this industry.
That's why I always tell my students: don't depend on me.
Before you close this window wondering why am I blogging about Mawi: No, this isn't about Mawi, at least not the way you think.
Circa 2005 or 2006, when I was still freelancing, I was looking around for some interesting animation projects to do. It happens that a client of mine directed a couple of Mawi's music videos, and wanted to do an animated one. Naturally, I jumped at the chance, not knowing what I was getting myself into.
It was a fully animated 4 minute video, with only 1 month to do it and an equally miniscule budget. But I was a struggling artist then (still is now...) so I figured this was my break. I managed to deliver the video (with 3 different endings) in a month, plus another 2 months (!) of changes and tweaks.
As you probably can see, the quality is, for lack of a better word, Crap, although I was immensely proud of myself then because I did 95% of the whole video alone, working through endless nights and even the Chinese New Year holidays even though it was apparent my animation skills sucked then.
Nonetheless, the awful quality meant that I won't be impressing anyone so I opted to leave it out of my showreels. To date, this is still the only music video that I have done and it was a unique experience for me, although I couldn't help but wish I could've done better.
Armored Core 4 had one of the best looking cinematic intro video and was one of my favorite CG game cinematic along with everything produced by Blur, Digic and Blizzard.
Then when you wonder how much better can giant fighting robots look, out comes the cinematic trailer for Armored Core: For Answer.
I spent a lot of time working on the shading and textures (including the billboards which were blurred to hell, I don't even know why I bothered...). The rendering time was awful because of the raytrace refraction, reflection and shadows, exponentially compounded by the use of radiosity and ambient occlusion.
The final image was composited and DOF blur applied in Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.
