Gman from Half Life 2

I wanted to switch to Blender for my personal projects (been using max and mental ray) so I did a render test with the Gman from Half Life 2. Model and textures by Valve, materials and lighting by me :). Blender render and hair with defocus and Photoshop for post. Hope you dig it. The mental ray version can be seen here:

http://gearheadart.blogspot.com/

Thanks for looking-

Gearhead

Attachments


Wow! You make this model???

So the answer to your question is no :spin:

Lol, cool render. I still dont know why they call him gman? But if the answer is something that will ruin the plot for me then dont tell because, I am currently working on playing all the games, lol only half way done with the first one so far :P. I might record myself playing and do a thing like freeman’s mind. Man, that series was hilarious.

Sorry, did not notice

seriously Awesome

looks good, i like your style, whats your light setup?

Hey Guys- Thanks for the comments. The lighting is pretty simple- see attachment. I used ray shads with the soft size at 3.5 and ambient occlusion set to 0.35. I used the sss shader for his head and an HDR map for the eye reflection. As far as the name Gman, I believe G is short for “Government”. Thanks again for looking.

Gearhead

Attachments


The mental ray render is obviously better, but blender still did a good job. I wonder if the blender render is not as good because you have less experience with it than max, or if it is just the limitations of the internal renderer. As I only have experience with blender, I have often wondered how it compares. Great work.

Looks very good. Nice lighting setup as well.
As they were game models, you may want to play with Blender’s Open GL materials settings and see if you get anything good out of that. I got the Doom 3 models imported and it turned out pretty good.

Also, you may want to to try Yafaray as a good external raytrace renderer that will work well with Blender.

Also, if you look around the python and plug-ins folder, someone has done a good V-Ray plug in.

I think someone did a MentalRay plugin for Blender, but I think its way out of date now.

Noobie- I have more experience with MR in max and I DL’d blender 3 or 4 weeks ago so it’s probably a little of both :). MR has loads more options but Blender has some nice tricks too.

Tea_Monster- The GLSL viewport stuff rules. Nice to be able see normal maps in the viewport.I have been looking at other renderers too- I will check out Yafaray (in my price range-free!) Do you use Yafaray? Does it have SSS? Blender rocks!

Thanks again for the comments.

Gearhead

Yafaray is good. Its very capable and very fast. Its not quite Mental Ray, but its no slouch either. More info is available here. The only problem I’ve had with it is that it tends to bomb out if you hand it something very large to render (several hundred thousand - 1M polys!). But that could be a memory thing on my part.

The other good one for speed is Kerkythea. The problem with that is that they have just gone commercial with another product. So Kerkythea is still free, but I doubt we will see any updates in the future. But its good, its free and its fast. Also, the scenes that bombed out Yafaray render fine in Kerkythea! I think that Yafaray produces better images though.

I know that Yafaray dosen’t have SSS, but it does have variable transparency, so I think you can fake it. You can also run most of your stuff though Yafaray for raytracing, and then composite back Yafaray renders for the SSS in Blender’s compositor.

Blender does rock. Its a pig to get to grips with at first, but my Maya freinds are all bowled over by how fast you can throw meshes together - “Huh, you made that in how long?” The only real drawback is the lack of rendering options. But some of our finest devs are working on that at the minute and a huge refactor of Blender’s own raytracing engine has just been committed to the 2.5 branch. So its getting much better.

N00BIE-The mental ray render is obviously better, but blender still did a good job. I wonder if the blender render is not as good because you have less experience with it than max, or if it is just the limitations of the internal renderer. As I only have experience with blender, I have often wondered how it compares. Great work.

Ok- this got me thinking and sure enough I did not have the normal map button pressed in the Map Image panel. So not a huge difference but here it is with the normal maps turned on.

Attachments


perfection
stuning impression

It’s looking better! I am so glad to see a talented user of commercial software migrating to blender!