I’ve been working on a sort of tribute/practice piece for a while based on Davy Jones from Pirates of the Carribean. The SSS is done using the toon shader/shadow map method, modelling wrinkles into the face with Sharp Construct and textures in the Gimp. The tentacle textures need more work to be interesting (varying colours, some warts etc.) and the seams need to be fixed to match the head. The hat isn’t textured yet either. I’ll be posting more images as I go along, maybe a rendered turnaround and so on.
Thankyou everyone for your compliments, it’s very reassuring. If I compacted the time I’ve spent (kinda been working on it in chunks) then I guess it would be a bit over a solid week of work. For whatever reason I started working on the modelling just before my major Uni assignments were due… felt inspired I guess. I’ve rendered out a small turnaround file (3.4MB) that can be downloaded at:
I would host it myself, but no personal website as yet.
More to come as I finish the character off. Most of the modelling was done using a basic “human head tutorial”, but would anyone be interested in me compiling a sort of ‘making of’ document? (Might take a while for me to get around to it though).
Cheers,
Ben
(P.S. Sorenson 3 Quicktime compression for the turnaround.)
No, he’s currently about 4.6 million polygons, so rigging him up would be a bit of a nightmare. Also, I dont want to spend much more time on a character I didn’t invent in the first place. My demo reel will be focussed on modelling and a bit of texturing anyway.
Wow. I assume from the sound of your posts that your going to a computer animation school?
[Edit] I have to be honest, this is one of the highest quality pieces of Blender work I’ve seen so far… For sure to go in the gallery when he’s finished.
<posted in wrong forum. This should be in Finished Projects>. I can just see the tentacles wriggling…ugh…but if you’re head’s getting too big from all these lavish comments, I will say that it still cannot compete with zombie.
I’ve been working on the tentacle texture - I made them dramatically more green with bumps and whatnot all over them, but in the end the SSS made most of the bumps look weird. The result is toned back close to where it was before, but greener in most parts with a bit more subtle variation in colour. Face hasn’t really changed, I’m quite happy with it. Still need to fix a few texture seams on the tentacles.
New rendered turnaround, much closer view of face and upper tentacles. Only 1.6MB this time, I’m experimenting with different compressions. If the file doesn’t run (rendered in FFMPEG in Linux) let me know. I just have to re-render the individual .tga files in a sequence editor.
How are you accomplishing 4.6 million polys - do you have seriously brutish hardware? You might want to try the sculpt tools in CVS - same author as sharpconstruct - but many improvements to the tools.
But first, to answer a few queries - I aim to leave him as a bust. Recreating the rest of him would be a fun challenge, but I’d rather put all that effort either in to a character of my own imagination or otherwise into a paid piece of work. (Any offers? :)) I’ve already got a few ideas for said ‘own character’, will definately post him/her from start to finish, maybe even knock up a tutorial as I go. Major condition for whether I’d do a tut or not is that there is already a lot of good ones out there for humanoids, so it would have to be for specific ‘unique bits’ like tentacles/odd hair/wings/armoured clothing etc etc. I’m pretty keen to sow some resources back into this forum community, it’s indirectly how I learnt much of what I know in 3D.
Secondly - over 4.5 million polys. Ummm… basically I upped my RAM from 512mb to 2 gig. I’d been meaning to buy a bit more memory recently, it’s now around $89AUS for a 512 mb stick. (You can do your respective local math.) I know thats not quite ‘lying around money’, especially for students, but it’s definately been worth it. Processor is about 2 years old, a Pentium4 3.2GHz I think. Good solid stuff, but not a dual or quad core (drools). RAM seemed to do wonders on it’s own though for simply holding more polys total. However, I will add that the model’s main parts are split into the hat. two sets of tentacles and the face. The face and hat were exported separately into SC for detailing and re-imported back in. There seemed to be a limit on what the UV mapper could handle, as well as the .obj importer, which is fair enough really - I was asking a lot of them. I didn’t use sculpt tools (although I did try them out) in blender because without boring detail, Blender and SC handle rendering different for realtime editing and in the end, Sharp Construct could handle more of a thrashing before crashing.
Also, final note - I now have a dual boot system with Windows and Linux. Windows can’t hack it anymore, the model wont render out. Linux manages memory better and low and behold, will render it out. Yay Linux!
actually till a few days ago - the lighting model/shading used in SC was better for sculpting (there was a work around in Blender where you could add a modifier and disable it but that was annoying). Also the masking hasn’t been implemented in Blender yet, just hiding.
As to the limits - point them out If you are running into limitations due to Blender - I’m sure the respective authors would be interested.
I’ll point cambo (obj in/out), Nicholas (sculpt), Brecht (uv mapping) and Ton (rendering) to this thread. Hopefully they can make some improvements based on your feedback.
As far as the limits go, I don’t think they were necessarily Blenders fault. For example, I was using either the UV copy script or the MakeHuman SSS script (which I’m not using any more in this project by the way, I prefer the toon SSS) and my computer would just chug away on a really high poly section of the head. As I had no way to tell if blender was frozen or not after a good hour, I decided to try it on my dad’s dual core laptop. It took 28 mins to compute and it worked. This means I was probably hitting limits on Windows and my hardware as far as sheer processing goes. If I do strike further limits that I suspect are Blender’s own though, I’ll be sure to pass them on.
I’m pretty sure he just ran out of memory, 4.5m faces without any uvs or
vertex colors takes up about 1.2gb here. Sharp construct probably uses
less memory because it stores less mesh data. The .obj importer has
extra memory overhead because it written in python, and when you start
uv mapping it creates uvs and vertex colors that take up a lot of space.
Rendering doesn’t free the original mesh data while rendering so memory
usage will roughly double. Sculpt mode probably allocates some extra
memory also, not sure.
If you are running into limitations due to Blender - I’m sure the respective authors would be interested.