Animated audition a short slap stick test

Here is an audition I did for a job at the start of the year. The mail came out of the blue on the 3rd of January "We would like you to complete the audition ASAP".  I was given a version of the model to work on by the company but the rigg didn't work and the mesh had errors and too much subdivision to skin easily so I had to rebuild and re-rigged it. It was a bit of a mad rush to get it done in time but good practice. I always liked cartoons like Road Runner and the Pink Panther so it was fun to do something slap stick. One of the best things about it was I showed it to my kids and they loved it. I  really enjoyed doing the animation and hope you enjoy watching it , I haven't done something like this for a while so it made a nice change.



It's a little bit like the style I used to work in when I worked for Kuju on the Eye Toy games, I have an urge to try doing some more work like this as it came very easy to me. The swords and sorcery stuff I'm working on at the moment is a bit of a battle at times. The funny green thing I animated for the audition was much easier to set up and build than the characters I've been making recently. With a bit of Z-brush fiddling it could look really cool I think.



The clip above was a style test I did for Kuju.

Flame Troll #3 Flame Spear

 

Here comes the Flame Troll with his Flame Spear! The animated gif was grabbed from the Maya file using Fcheck with the high quality render on the viewing panel. High quality render is in terms of real time render.....so not really high quality just a quick grab. I thought seeing as in my previous Flame Troll entries I mentioned how I had him walking around, I should provide evidence of this. The reason why I didn't put him up before, I suppose some of you might be able to guess; the rigg is my standard rigg which I use for most of my models and most of my models are sci-fi orientated so the troll was walking around with the same giant laser gun most of my characters come equipped with.

The Flame Spear is a pretty simple model, I enjoyed making it and it made a nice change from having to worry about skinning and all the hassle I had with making the functioning plate armor for the troll. I was really happy with the way the design turned out and having to work through all the surfacing on the armor suit and the designs of the seals and sigils on the armor definitely helped me with the spear.

I loved sculpting the details in Z-Brush, the flowing fret work I did in the centre of the spear was done with masks and using the symmetry feature where work on the left half is repeated on the right. Very quick to do so I think I did a few versions but very fun, the kind of thing where it's so easy you feel like you're cheating.

After having an easy time of it with the sculpting I hit a brick wall with the normal mapping and couldn't understand why. I was getting very strange warping on the blade edges of the spear which made no sense to me as the high poly sculpt and low poly base were extremely similar. I turned to the internet and searched for the solution but it seemed an uncommon problem. I found many tutorials on how to make edged fantasy weapons, none of which had the same problems I was having. I finally found something about triangulation needing to be the same in Xnormal as in the source program (maya), my low poly model was mostly quads so I triangulated it and that solved the problem. It never occurred to me that Xnormal would divide quads differently.

I've used a little bit of self illumination, (or incandescence as it is in Maya) on the spear jewel. It's a separate map like the colour map but it holds only the colour that should glow, in this case a subtle rosy red  on the jewel itself and also on the metal around the stone. It gives the impression that the luster from the stone is reflecting in the metal.

Below is the colour map and normal map. The incandescence map is not much to look at being mostly black. I put the normal map in as I talk so much about them but I guess if your not used to 3d you would not have seen one before. The normal map works with the three colour channels red, blue and green. Each colour behaves as a projected light hitting the detail of the surface of the model from a different direction. This information then gives the impression of surface detail when rendered in a 3d program. It's similar to the old grey scale bump maps I used to use except that they are just dealing with height, black being in white being out to give the impression of bumps hence bump map.

 Below is the Z-Brush sculpt of the spear, there was some fret work on the base of the spear that was so fine it was really not worth the bother, as to see it requires getting so close to the model that the low poly nature of the base model ruins the effect. One day I will learn not to go over board with details....maybe.

 To finish a couple of renders of the full model, I will be returning with more of the Flame Troll as I have built an environment for this character too, an archetypal dungeon/ castle cell with flaming torches, sturdy hewn stone walls and studded wooden doors. I am intending to animate some new work for my showreel with this set up as in my recent audition work I am often asked to animate scenes which I don't currently have on my reel. I think there are way too many walk cycles in my reel and it needs some Flame Troll to liven things up.

Space Trooper poly character model

 Here is a character model I've been working on in the background for some time. You may remember previously in Deranged Scratchings I put forward the character design for a Space Trooper but readers wanted me to build an alien with his brain in a jar and his eye on a stalk. I of course sympathized with this point of view and was happy to build said alien. I did however harbor a sneaking suspicion that there might be more of a demand for space soldiers than cooky looking aliens (I know heart breaking right?) and have been spending some time getting my camouflage and blast resistant kit into polygonal shape.

Above you can see the original design something between Street Fighters Bison and a padded UN soldier but in red instead of blue. Not my best character design I admit so I had another go. I did a bit of research this time and looked at what the latest fashions are in military apparel, added a sprinkling of sci-fi pixy dust  and came up with the second version which I was much happier with. I then want on to make the character in Z-Brush which......doesn't look anything like my concept sketch at all. This is not in any way to do with me getting distracted from my original concept, I have an iron will and would never start thinking that this character would look cool with giant spider, bionic spider legs with skulls on, with ethereal spirit aliens from dimension x riding a plinth of bones on his back....soooo anyway, below you can see the character running in Maya which is where I do all the skin weighting and rigging.

 Actually I'm getting ahead of myself I did a rough version that I had to throw away, there was a problem with the base mesh which meant I had to go back and start from scratch. I didn't get that far into the sculpting but it was still a pain at the time. I approached this model in a slightly different way to how I usually do my character models. Basically my normal method is to get a model that works properly in Maya and then take it into Z-Brush to add details. This model was created much more in Z-Brush, the idea was to take a much more loose organic approach to the modelling more like sketching in clay and then working over that to get the finished model. It did work but there was more than the usual amount of trial and error. I had some problems with skinning because when I build the mesh in Maya I have more experience and better control, got there in the end though. The below character went missing in action before he even got any colour to him. I have swapped over to xNormal for normal mapping now as it's much more consistent for creating  normal maps. Z-Brush is great for modeling but there are often problems if you use it to generate your normal maps.

 

Above is the Z-Brush model from which I generate the normal maps from. He doesn't have his giant metal cuffs on as they needed to be done as two separate models. I learned a bit more about modelling machined metal surfaces from the cuffs which I also ended up doing over, three times in the end but I guess it was worth it as I went onto you tube to track down some useful tutorials which will be useful for the future. I would still like to make a robot model at some point and have not forgotten how popular the steam punk robot design I did was.

You can see the rigg above. I accidentally left a triangulated laser gun in with the quad mesh which probably sounds like gobeldy gook to most of you. However as a result I finally got round to swapping in a rifle, just the quad version but what this means is I discovered it's very easy to swap in different rifles. I have been planning on creating a new rifle model for ages. Now I know that there is no technical problem in the way.

Above is the UV map as usual I got everything on one sheet to keep things nice and simple. That's the colour map there which you can use without any of the other maps if you want. The normal map does look great but at a distance you can drop it to save memory.

Next the wire frames, it's a slightly higher poly count for this model at 3756 but still relatively low. The rifle is relatively high at 598, another reason I've been thinking about making a new one as I reckon I can get a lower poly version that actually looks more detailed now I have more experience with Z-Brush. You can see that the cuffs are separate pieces although the mesh is one node. The cuffs are skinned with a value of 1 to a forearm joint which handles the twist you get when you rotate you wrist. I've refined the rigg on this and it's working nicely.

On to the animation set, I added a walk cycle and a jump animation to the old set so he still does all the running, strafing and death diving as before.

So there we go mission accomplished. One Space Trooper reporting for duty.

Cyber Punk Shoot Out

Zap zap pew pew pew kaboom arrrrrrrgh! It's time to shine up your laser cannon and make sure the batteries are charged! Those crazy cyber punks are having a proper shoot out and it doesn't look like they're planning to quit till things get crispy.

I have been saying that I was going to post this video for months and now I have finally got round to it. Would you believe the only thing stopping me was that I needed to do the screen grabs you see above? Well I finally got my act together. I am feeling a bit burnt out today working on a set of animations for my current project. I am working on a really cool game at the moment that as usual I can't talk about (I think saying that it's cool and something I've always wanted to work on is allowed).

I finished making this video months ago but I still remember how much of a pain in the ass the rendering program Mental Ray was. I got this horrible error message when I tried to use motion blur "shapes are not equivalent, no motion vectors computed". It took me quite a lot of fiddling about to get it to work. It seems it's one of those errors where you find lots of dead ends when trying to search for a solution online. I wasn't prepared to give up on having motion blur, it seems like a basic right that no animator should be denied so I persevered. It can be as simple as deleting history from a model but in this case it was because I was animating visibility, so be warned. I still find it utterly ridiculous that Mental Ray can't cope with animating the visibility channel. A very basic and useful technique that I've been using for years.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, lots of crazy punks with laser guns blow the crap out of each other. Enjoy!

Deranged Alien Invasion

Look out the aliens are invading Deranged Scratchings, these extraterrestrial fiends have been running the show round here for all of 2013, I may have managed to finally kick them out the door. I was unable to stop them multiplying and changing colour, they also drank all the beer and ate all the pizza.You can now get your very own invader from out of space. He is happy running around any 3d game and comes with his very own set of games animations, for more details click this Alien Invader Rigged & Animated link

Wub wub wub!

Red- "You're funny looking"                     Blue- "But were on the same side"               

I am happy with the way the colour variants worked out, I think I like the blue one best. I always seem to leave sorting out the team colours till last. It's a pretty easy and rewarding job, all the work goes into the base texture which was green for this character as green is the time honoured colour for men from outer space. Once the base colour is in place and looking good I separate out the elements which will remain the same on all versions, like scratches mud and also the bare metal details on this model. The next step is basically a colour tweak in Photoshop.

This is a longer than usual post so I added a jump break. To watch this alien eat his laser rifle and burp it back out again and to see the other animation you need to hit the read more button.

Aliens Are Better Than Zombies

Right then following up from my previous entry Zombies or Aliens Which are better?, I asked my readers to choose from eight character designs to determine which would become a fully functioning rigged and animated games character model. The people have spoken, the votes are in, and it turns out aliens are better, zombies didn't even get a look in. The real race was between a steam punk robot and an alien.....

In the green corner Alien (in a jar with cyborg body)
The peoples choice by a whopping one vote.
Total votes five. Winner!

And in the red corner Steam Punk Cooker!
Four votes total runner up and all round friend of kitchens

You can see at the top of the page that the lucky alien has made it into polygons and is now decidedly three dimensional. Thanks to everyone who voted it was great to get so many comments.

My influences for the character were probably many I've watched lots and lots of old science fiction films from a pretty early age as my Dad was a big fan of sci-fi films and books. The last time I looked, his garage was a sci-fi library which would put many small book shops to shame. I guess one film that sticks in my mind would be This Island Earth which has a great monster, Fiend Without a Face definitely had an influence. Invaders From Mars a film I can remember nothing about except a weird head thing with tentacles in a gold fish bowl I guess that right there is movie genius. But the main one and probably my favorite film sequence ever would be from The Life Of Brian the bit where Brian is trying to escape a roman patrol and falls off a half finished tower into a passing UFO. It pretty much documents the entirety of how my mind works and you can watch it here.

 Some minor aspects needed to change from the concept painting because this model is a variation of the cyber punk model. This means that the aliens skeleton has to line up exactly with the previous model. If elbows knees or finger joints aren't precisely placed, you get a very ugly mess. It's a bit restricting but I quite like to see how great a variation I can get using the same skeleton and only altering the skin. In games terms it's called a re-skin.

Below you can see the journey back into 2d that every character must make if it is to be painted, the uv map. One flattened alien opened in Photoshop and painted. I still hate uv mapping and this alien was a right pain. I used Z-brushes UV master plugin which is very buggy and has a mind of it's own. It seems to do a great job if you just leave the default setting and just flatten your character (yes there is a button which says flatten) however if you try to make the program do what you want it either resists or crashes......joy!

Actually I'm getting ahead of myself before I painted the model I sculpted the details in Z-brush. Below you can see the aliens organic bits. I also had a nightmare with this model as I could not get the details to export properly out of Z-brush and needed to get a new program, Xnormal to sort out the mess. I don't know which wastes more time for me, software or the amount of time I spend swearing at it. It has not been a smooth ride getting anywhere with this model but hopefully I will be able to finish off the last bits and bobs without so much trouble.

Still Z-brush is worth it for the sculpting results. I was just recently telling some fellow artists what a great program it was and how I had found it easy to learn.....oh the irony. Anyway below you can see where I am currently at with this odd ball  B-film creature. I think he was worth all the hassle after all. Some of you may have noticed that to get started on this model I had to vote in my own competition because voting kept reaching a tie between the cooker robot and Mr brains in a jar. I picked him because mechanical characters are not easy to sculpt in Z-brush it's much easier to do organic creatures like this one, even though he does have some mechanical hard surface elements. After I left the comment that voting was closed, Steam Punk Cooker got another vote. Maybe I need to build the cooker too?

I still need to finish up the skeleton and controls for this bug eyed space creeper. In the early tests I managed to get him to blink and the eye should be able to move too, I sacrificed a few of the cyber punks fingers to get the extra joints (I try and keep the joint count the same between variants). I have had a rough version playing all the cyber punks animations so it shouldn't be too hard. The cyber punks animations will be showing here shortly. Also it's worth mentioning happy bloody new year! and 20000+ page views thank you for taking the time for Deranged Scratchings!

Cyborg #3 Renders

Back with project Cyborg for the presentation renders, these are done in Mental Ray with Maya. I ended up using the blue version for the signature image. I was thinking of using the green cyborg image below but I decided that the blue image was more readable. Maybe it's because the laser rifle is old news to me now. You can see that he has a nice collection of staples over his belly and some over his face too, giving him a bit of a Frankenstein's creation look. The Cyborg model is up and ready to buy on Turbosquid, if you already have the Cyber Punk the Cyborg will make a handy team mate for your project.

 I think the metal textures work very nicely in the green and it helps to make the character quite menacing and creepy. The blue version has a nice gun metal military feel to it. It seems slightly reminiscent of Robocop which I also like. I don't think my character looks much like a cop though more like Robogrunt or Roboredneck. Beered up with a laser cannon and a right hook that could cold cut a wooly mammoth, not something I would like to run into.

 Here is a back view, I was thinking of adding some animated pistons to the four circular areas between where his shoulder blades would be, but I wanted to keep the poly count fairly close to the Cyber Punk and I ran out of polygons. There are lots more polygons in this characters cyborg arms than there are in a more normal organic character. I would like to try some kind of bio-mechanical creature as I am a big fan of HR Giger and I think it would work very well as an approach in Zbrush. I have been neglecting the animation for these characters though so I am planning on getting down with some basic game set animations next.

Above are the wire frame shots, it's mostly quads. I cut out some polygons from his legs which were present in the cyber punk version of this model. The Zbrush sculpt, textures and UV map are totally redone from the cyber punk version. I just felt like I needed the practice, I think the boots worked out better but I like the trousers for the punk.

Looking around at other artists interpretations of cyborgs I've noticed a lot of what I would describe as robots. I wanted to deal more with a man machine cross and the slightly unsettling quality of the amalgam of the organic with the synthetic. I imagine that there would be all sorts of complications and new qualities  to such a creation, no longer entirely human but still very much more than machine. You might have noticed that the slots which are present in the place where a normal human characters eyes would be, on this character go very deep into what would be the characters head. I imagine the mix of machine and man with this character to go very deep all the way through to his senses, emotions and how he thinks.

 I do like setting up the team versus scenes even though my computer struggles with them. As you can see I have again opted for the colour variants so that you can use the model in a four way battle even if you only have the cyborg to play with. Rendering one character is no problem but four at once makes my computer chug. I find it hard to go for a draft low quality version, I am good on my first render but once I've turned all the refractions reflections and fancy shiny features on I find it hard to go back to the bog standard render which would be better for my work flow.

 

It's that corridor again. I keep using it even though it is not a friendly render object in any way, I really should build another one that's faster to render.

So this leaves the clear question which of course is pressing on all of your minds: who would win in a fight? the Cyborg or the Cyber Punk?

"Hey stitches....your ugly and you smell of spark plugs"

Cyborg #2 Polygons and Zbrush

 I've been working on the cyborg taking it on from the concept in my last entry. The second design, the green cyborg got the most votes from my readers so that's the one that I'm working on. I did also like the red design, the first cyborg so I may try that one as well. I have also been thinking about doing a zombie character, an alien and also some generic kind of space trooper. 

Above is where I am currently at with the cyborg. I am close to done with the painting, there are some fine details that are not showing up on the trousers and boots. That's probably down to the lighting,  I can maybe get the paint job to help out on this with some more work. The first job was to get the basic polygonal shell in place, you can see it in it's bind pose below. Most of the polygons went into the robotic arms and the cross design on the helmet.

The next job was to get it set up with the same skeleton the cyberpunk is using. It went quite smoothly and because  there is a run animation on the cyber punk I could straight away see the cyborg animating, this makes setting up the deformations on the polygon shell much easier. The laser rifle is the same model I used for the cyberpunk. I am planning to add some more animations although the next post will likely be some better renders with nice lighting, poses and the paint job finalised.

 I then took the model into Zbrush where I started by mapping the UV's. Once that was done I set about sculpting the fine details in. It's a fun job and makes me feel much more like a proper artist than pulling vertices about in Maya (building the base poly mesh above). Poly modelling is quite a cold clinical business you need to be accurate and give the impression of a natural rounded form while working with harsh sharp edges Zbrush really changes that, it's much more tactile. As I said before it's something like painting with clay, you use a graphics tablet and either add or subtract strokes of simulated poly clay. You're still working with polygons but I guess a single stroke is pushing hundreds or thousands of polygons at a time. There is probably a hundred polygons or more in a single scratch in the cyborgs metal plates. Zbrush is great for natural forms like the contours and wrinkles of a face but it is quite tricky for less natural more mechanical subjects like this character. It was quite a challenge but still fun. Putting all the dents, scratches and rivets in at the end was an easy way to add character to the cyborg.