Link Project 013

Update time! So recently I got a full time job so I could pay my bills. This is going to take away from my time working on projects but I figure it's for the better in the long run. The faster I can make money so I can start applying for 3D jobs again, the better. So forgive me if post are a little lacking from here on out but I am going to do my best to keep up with my projects.

As for Link's progress, I am finally ready to start testing cloth simulations. I finished Link's rig and promptly made a "rig test/celebration" video.

After creating that video I realized there were a few things that needed some adjustment. So I went in and made corrections. One problem was that the right arms pivots were not the same so I had to re adjust those. I also adjusted the joint placement for the eyes and eyelids. Before they weren't in the center of the eye and weren't rotating properly.

Now everything seems to be in working order. The only thing I may go back and fix is Link's tongue and teeth. I am not really happy with the way they look.

Since the rig is pretty much complete I decided to create a video going over the features I created on Link's rig.

That's all for this weeks post. Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Link Project 012

Forgive me for the lack of post recently. I would like to be working on Link more often but my progress has really slowed. Also I work on Saturdays now so it's had to find time before work to gather all my resources to present to you. I may end up switching the days I create post just so I can provide you with more substantial posts.
Anyways, I finally managed to get all the face controls created and Links eyes are now working with controls. Now I just need to create all the sdk keys for the face controls and his rig should be good to go. I am really looking forward to the finished rig so I can start clothing simulation.
Here are some screen shots and some Link winks ;D.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Link Project 011

Hello Everyone, sorry for not posting last Saturday. I was still extremely busy and didn't get a chance to work on Link. Luckily I was finally able to work on him this past Thursday.

Not much of an update, since I only got to work on him one day. I managed to get a decent skinning on Link and I also fixed the spine to follow the Master Ctrl. The rig is pretty close to being done. I am just adding a few things and I still need to create the face controls. I added some joints to control the dangling hair on the side of his face and I was thinking of making them dynamic. Not sure though, I feel like it might get too janky and it won't be worth it in the end.

Hopefully this upcoming week I will have more for you and finally be able to finish Link's rig. Until then, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Breif Intermission

Hello everyone,
Sorry, but there's no update this week because I have been working on something else. I just happened to randomly get a commission while I was at work. So I have been working on that. Pretty close to finishing so next week I should have an update. 
Thank you for your patience and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Link Project 010

Sorry for posting later than I said I would. Had to do a lot more than I thought.
So like I said before, the rig is pretty much finished. All I need to do is incorporate the eyebrows and hair into the rig, and then create the face controls. Once that is done I can do a refined skinning and he should be ready to go.
I ended up finding a video on youtube that helped me figure out what I needed to do to get a working fk/ik spine. Here is the video link if you are interested. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhGCGe1dLxA
After watching the video, I scrapped my old setup and controls and created new ones based off the tutorial. It was actually pretty easy incorporating the spine once it was finished because I had everything setup from when I previously tried to create the fk/ik spine.
My rigs right arm is still a little janky so I have to look into that and I also need to make the spine work properly with the master control. Other than that everything is looking good.
Here is a little video I made just testing the rig with a rough skin bind.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Link Project 009

Will be posting update later tonight/tomorrow morning. Pretty much got rig working properly now. FK/IK spine is now fully working, WOOOO! I couldn't have done it without a youtube tutorial that I found online though. I will go into detail later. I created a very rough skin bind for the rig and plan to record an animation test that I will post with the full update.

Hope you look forward to it.

Link Project 008

I have now finished most textures for link. All I have left for textures is to create specular/reflection maps and tweak shaders. Here is my latest render.

Still might tweak the saturation of the boots and the clothing isn't final. Just thought I would add some color to the low res meshes. Also not sure if I will leave the hair one solid color or paint a texture for it. I feel like leaving it solid fits the style. What do you think?

Now that I have pretty much finished the textures I can now go back and finish up the rig. Once the rig is complete I can start testing simulations. 

Not that big of an update, would like to have worked more on Link but some things came up this week. For example, my website is currently down and I had to create a temporary one. If you want to check it out here is the link:

http://jesusmundo.weebly.com/

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Link Project 007

Just a quick post with a turnaround of my Link model so far. Not the best quality, but it gets the job done.

Link Project 006

So at this point, I believe I started creating the hair. I originally planned to simulate hair using Maya's hair system. I tried creating the hair in Zbrush but I couldn't get the volume that I wanted the hair to have. Instead I ended up creating curves in Maya that I would use to create the hair. This was a very long and tedious task and to be honest, it drained my enthusiasm for the project.
So I decided to take a "quick" break from it so I wouldn't get burned out. I thought I could quickly create a SSS (sub-surface scattering) piece (my female portrait project) and put it on my reel. Turned out that the piece took a lot longer than expected. But I think it was for the better. I learned a lot while working on it and it also got me motivated again. With that project finished I came back to this one and made some corrections to my model.
Some of the advice I got from my friend for the clothing was to create a single low poly mesh to base my simulation off of. With that in mind, my problem areas were the belt area and the pants. The belt area would be hard to simulate if I was using one mesh for the tunic so I decided to split it in half.
I also originally had the pants as a separate mesh to simulate over Link's legs. His "pants" are actually tights, so there was no point in simulating them, instead I could just use them as his legs. So I removed Link's legs and merged his pants as his legs. 
Lastly I also decided that the realistic simulated hair wasn't fitting the stylized look. Especially since he didn't have realistic eyebrows. So I refined the block in hair mesh that I made and decided to use that. So far the hair has been very troublesome but I'm getting closer to a result I'm happy with.
For now, here are some progress images.

That's about all for now. I do have one more thing I will be uploading later due to my internet being rather poor lately. This post is pretty close to my current progress. By my next post I should be all caught up.

Until then, thank you for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post.

Link Project 005

As promised here are some screenshots of the rig.

It's not super fancy but it will get the job done. I also thought I would make it a little interesting by creating a master control and a help guide that were Legend of Zelda themed. When I finish this project I plan the also create a real time version that I can give to anyone who would like a copy. I can't promise you that it will be the best rig you've ever used but it's something to play with.

The rig isn't finished yet but it's close. I created fk/ik arms, legs, and a spine. I wanted to test creating a fk/ik spine because in my rigging experience I always seem to have to use a fk spine. The ik spine seems to break whenever it gets too far away from the master control and I still haven't figured out how to fix it. I still have some bugs to work out with the fk/ik spine switch too but so far the fk spine is working.

Next time I will show you the corrections I made to the model and the final sculpt. Also, I plan on posting weekly that way I can have more substance to my post. I think I will try to get a post up every Saturday from now on. So until then, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to my next post. 

Link Project 004

Hello everyone, sorry for the long absence. Something came up that required my full attention but thankfully I believe the crisis has been averted.

Anyway, I didn't mean for the last post to be so dramatic. Hopefully you didn't think because I got stuck on simulating the clothing that I gave up. No, luckily I have some really talented and good friends who can help me when I get stuck. I simply sent a message and a work file to a friend familiar with simulating clothing and he helped me work it out. Once again, thanks for the help Bugi.

Once I figured out what I needed to do I reset myself and started thinking about different ways I could setup the clothing. I also needed to setup a rig in order to test if the cloth simulation was working properly or not. So I started setting up my base rig with the clothing in mind.

That's all for now, sorry I don't have any W.I.P. pictures for this post but I will have some next time. Now that I have everything taken care of I should be able to get back to regular post. Till then, thank you for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Link Project 003

Now that I had my game plan, I started modeling. With this project I decided that I wanted to challenge myself and simulate clothing. Since I had never attempted simulating clothing and had only seen it done, I just went for it thinking that I was going to simulate everything.I started off by creating my character base in ZBrush. I created links body using ZSpheres then started sculpting.
Here was my result.

I also created a hair block-in that I would base my simulated hair strands off of.

Now that I had my base sculpt done, I imported it into Maya and retopoed the character and made base clothing that I would be able to simulate.

It was here that I started playing around with the dynamics of the clothing to see what I would be able to get away with.

It did not go as planed ...

That's it for today, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Link Project 002

Back in August I attended Siggraph (a conference for computer graphics), and talked to some recruiters. Some advice I got was adding some live action work to my demo reel. So, I started planning out a live action project. I figured  this would also give me a good chance to work on my generalist skill set and let me explore some things I haven't tried before.
First off, I threw around some ideas of what I wanted to do and ended up settling on creating a Legend of Zelda fan art piece. Here is my concept.

All it states is what I require to create the piece, and I made some quick doodles of what I want to happen.

So with my concept done, I started gathering resources. I really like the way that the wind waker link looks, so I made that my main reference for my model.

So now that I had my main reference, I started the modeling process. Even though I really like the look of my reference, I adapted the character model to my own style. I also wanted to make it a little more realistic to fit the live action setting.

Well that's it for now, thank you for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Link Project 001

Just thought I would make a quick post about my next project. I have started working on it, just haven't gotten around to getting stuff together for making blog post. I will start giving you updates shortly though. Here is a quick teaser of what to expect.

Again please don't hesitate to critique my previous project. Anything helps, that way I know what I need to improve the next time around.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Female Portrait 011

Once I finished the hair, I did some minor tweaks on the skin and set everything up for rendering. Here are some different views of the final render at half quality.

And here is a screen grab of my flow in Fusion. It's not anything fancy but I figured I would show it.

And finally, the final render.

I am happy with the final result. No it's not perfect, and no it's not anywhere near the level I want to be at but it's a start. I learned a lot working on this project and I think it's time I call it finished. There are a lot of things I could nit pick but if I did that I would never finish. I now know that I gotta keep working hard so I can become better and faster. I'm sure one day I will look back on this and think how bad it looks just like I did with my first attempt. But, that is all part of learning and progressing.

I still plan on doing a turnaround with different IBL's but that will take some time since I only have my one work machine. Once I finish that I will add it to my demo reel and possibly create a quick post with it.

Thank you for reading my post and seeing my progress through this project. Since this is done, I plan on going back to a live action project that I was working on previously. Till then, I hope you look forward till the next post.

Female Portrait 010

Alright, well it's been a few days since my last post but I can now say that I am finished. There are a few things that I still want to do but for the most part it is done.

So for the past couple days I have been trying to get the hair coloring to feel correct according to my reference. It wasn't as easy as I was hoping it was gonna be. From the start I knew there was no real way to paint the texture for the hair since it has no UV's. But, I had did some test on my first iteration that gave me some ideas on how to achieve my goal.

What I ended up doing was splitting the hair into sections. I ended up with eight sections. Each section had a ramp texture plugged into the diffuse, secondary specular, and transmission of the V-Ray hair material. The only part that I had a problem with was the back of the hair. I had the look I wanted but I needed it to go the opposite direction.

I did a lot of testing to see if I could get it to go the right direction. I figured out that it was receiving it's information from a V-Ray hair sampler node. The attribute it was using was the distance along strand. Below you can see the nodes in Maya's hypershade.

After trying for a while I decided I needed help. I sought out help from my friends but they weren't sure how to solve the problem either. In the end I decided it was a lost cause and I needed to find another method to achieve what I wanted.

I ended up using the different hair sections that I created to my advantage. I selected specific hair clumps that I wanted to change the color of and assigned them to other hair systems. Doing so, changed the color information to the other hair section I assigned it to. After some time I achieved a look that I was happy with.

I will end this post here just to keep it short. I am posting the final render right after I finish this post though. 

Thanks for reading.