So for the last month or so I’ve gotten a lot more serious about using Blender. I feel like it’s right at the edge of being usable for production. Normally I use Maya and Modo. I worked for 8 or 9 years in Max, Maya and C4D depending on the studio I was working for at the time. Before that it was mainly lightwave with a sprinkling of Softimage here and there. I work as an Animator and TD in commercials but recently I’ve been doing more animation for games and it seems to suit me better. Eventually I’ll start back up working on my short film and I’m hoping to put Blender through it’s paces to see if I can use it on that.
So, here’s a little project I’ve start working on in the last few days in my spare time:
The sculpt was done a while ago in Sculptris before Blender had dynamic topology.
I’m not exactly sure what method I’m going to use to get the details back into the mesh. I’ll probably start with backing a normal map from the sculpt onto the new mesh first.
This is going to seem super weird… but I think you might have some how, some way, worked on a commercial I did… I recognize your avatar somehow and my brain is connecting it with a studio we worked with… for whatever reason. Either that or I have just seen it around in threads and it has become familiar to me and my brain has decided to attach a story to it.
Either way, I really dig the character style, and the clean geometry makes me envious.
Thanks B-rae for the kind words! It’s entirely possible we’ve worked together. I’ve been doing CG since 1993 and before that I was working in Stop motion. But I’ve only worked in Portland and LA. My avatar is from my short film that I’ve working on for a looooong time now.
Here’s the latest progress. I added an adams apple and changed some of the flow in his neck that was bothering me. I also fixed up the back of his ears (which I realize you can’t even see). I’m still not quite sure if he’s wearing socks or some kinds of soft shoes. His base mesh is basically finished. Next step is to UV map him. This is something I’ve never done in Blender before so wish me luck. If it goes awry I might have to pop him into Modo and do it there. Actually, I might have to take him into modo at some time sooner or later because I don’t know anything about baking normal maps in Blender but in modo it’s second nature. At any rate, even if that’s the case, I’ll still bring it back into Blender since this is all about evaluating it for production. Obviously in production, you just use whatever the best tool is and sometimes that’s the one you know the best and not necessarily the one with the most features.
This is just a quick and dirty render just to get an idea for colors and surfacing. Sometimes I like to do this just to take a break from modeling. I was also testing out the Subsurface scattering on the head and hands:
Finished the UV mapping. Wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting it to be. Turns out the process is exactly the same as Modo. You can even pin verts and interactively manipulate the unwrapping. I really liked the visualization of the stretching in the UV view. At one point this went away (accidentally turned it off?) and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it back on. Anyone know anything about this?
EDIT: Oh and I also altered his hands to make them look less fat and brought up his arm pit area to look less saggy.
Just curious Indy… is this guy going to be incorporated as a character in the short film you’ve been working on? In either case it’s nice to watch your progress on this project.
Hi harleynut97, Thanks! I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do with him just yet. my plan is to rig him for animation with facial controls and everything so I’m sure he’ll end up animated in some form. But, at the moment I don’t really have a story for him yet.
Alright, I’ve been struggling for about a week now trying to figure out how to get the displacement details into his face. I tried sculpting them in Blender but I wasn’t really getting the results I was wanting. So, i just loaded his head into ZBrush and made it look the way I wanted instead of just settling for what Blender could do. No dig against Blender’s sculpt tools it’s just that it’s hard to beat ZBrush in the end. Anyway, I ran into all sorts of issues on the way back into Blender as well. As far as I can tell, Blender doesn’t deal with 16 bit TIFF files very well. I ended up saving an EXR out of ZBRush (which is overkill in this case) and using the displacement input in Cycles as opposed to the Displacement modifier. Truth be told, I couldn’t really figure that out at all. Following all the instructions I was able to find, I was only able to get a bloated effect. Looking at the results, I’m not even sure if Blender is actually displacing the surface or if it’s just doing some kind of normal trickery.
So, this is where I’m at with the displacement. Next up is displacement wrinkles on his clothing and wrinkles on his hands. Then I’ll start thinking about color maps.
As far as I know, the displacement input in the cycles material nodes is just for bump/normal, it does not change any geometry, only the displace modifier actually creates physical displacement. If you wanted to go that route you would be have to subdivide your model with a modifier (earlier in the stack, before the displace) to get the right amount of density for the displacement to look decent.
Personally, I think the texture around his brow might be a bit much, but then again, he doesn’t have any fur on his eyebrows yet so it is hard to judge.
Ahhhh that makes more sense. I was wondering why I wasn’t seeing the edges displace and the detail looked so odd. Not gonna lie, I’ve really been struggling with this for some reason. I only just now got it to a place where it doesn’t look like utter crap.
Yeah, I actually did just that before. I’m not exactly sure what I was doing wrong as there really isn’t a good reference tutorial for applying ZBrush displacement maps in Blender. Well, I bet there is but I wasn’t able to find exactly what I was looking for. Most of the tutorials are from the perspective of baking displacement from a sculpt in Blender.
Ugh… As much as I hate to admit it, I think you are absolutely right about that. Especially between the brows. Major crunchy looking. It’s easy enough to fix in ZBrush though. Just need to do it and export a new map.
So, I’ve been struggling with getting displacement maps or displaced geometry into Blender from ZBrush. I’m very comfortable in that program and it’s just so much faster then Blender for sculpting. So, I sculpted the head and the hoodie in there and figured that I could just export some maps to work in Blender. Well honestly, This isn’t very easy or straight forward unfortunately. So I tried a little of this and a little of that and came to the conclusion that I just wasn’t going to be able to get the results I wanted that way but I would just have to live with it…
But then… In another thread someone gave me the ultimate tip: Reproject the ZBrush model back onto the Retopo model right in Blender!!
So, it goes like this:
1.) Import your ZBrush model into Blender, line it up with your retopology model (if the model is making a round trip from Blender to ZBrush, back to Blender, it should already be in the right place),
2.) assign a multires modifier to the retop and subdivide it.
3.) Then, just under that add a shrink-wrap modifier and select your ZBrush model to wrap to and voila!
The Zbrush model has effectively been re-projected onto the re-topologiezed model! Soooo handy! And actually I can’t figure out why this isn’t a feature unto it’ self within the Mulires modifier? I mean, if you knew you could re-project detail onto any model, wouldn’t that be a feature worth mentioning?
So here’s the results. What’s funny is that all of this just makes me realize that what I really need to do is learn how to use Blender’s sculpting better. So, last night I spend an hour or so sculpting the wrinkles in the pants:
I have no clue why I am still the only one posting on your thread… but I will continue anyways.
I really like where you are at here, like I have said, I dig the style. I still think that his brows (not mid-brow/forehead, but where his eyebrows would be) is a weird texture/topology, but maybe that is just me. Are you going to be giving him any hair (or eyebrows)?
Yeah, I don’t get it either. There must be something intrinsically unappealing about this guy that I’m just not picking up on. Either way, this is our secret little thread now.
So, you think there should be less diagonal wrinkles along his brow? Now that I compare the current model to the original, I can see that I did go a bit overboard. Now that I think about it, I’m not at all sure why I did that in the first place. I think it was like he was always frowning and furrowing his brow that they he got these ridges in them. But now that I look at him, it doesn’t really make sense anymore. I’ll tone that down. Now that the displacement data is in Blender it’ll be a lot easier to make little changes. As far as hair, I definitely plan to put hair on him. Brows, eyelashes, and hair. But that will come later. I have to get through the part I hate the most.
I’m not working this week so I’ll have a lot more time to spend on him. Shooting for finishing up in the next couple days.
okay, i know, three’s a crowd, but I must say this guy is full of awesomeness! Great sculpt, especially the head. As alien as he looks, he’s still looks more human than most realistic human head models. He also has something slightly unsettling about him. It might be that the face looks very realistically old whilst the body proportions are more child-like, or something, I dunno.
It would be great to see him come to life. Keep it up!
If it goes awry I might have to pop him into Modo and do it there. Actually, I might have to take him into modo at some time sooner or later because I don’t know anything about baking normal maps in Blender but in modo it’s second nature. At any rate, even if that’s the case, I’ll still bring it back into Blender since this is all about evaluating it for production. Obviously in production, you just use whatever the best tool is and sometimes that’s the one you know the best and not necessarily the one with the most features.
Either way, this is our secret little thread now. 
