This is another architectural pre-visualization we did recently for one of our clients who needed to test out a few construction materials for their project.

building exterior 01

The project was done using 3DS Max 2009, Photoshop and Vray and the compositing was done in Fusion.

Fusion composition layout

You can see some of the layers we used in the table below:

ar_ghabtec_trees_vray_zdepth	ar_ghabtec_trees_vray_renderid	ar_ghabtec_trees_vray_rawshadow
ar_ghabtec_trees_vray_rawreflection	ar_ghabtec_trees_01	ar_ghabtec_int
ar_ghabtec_rawreflection	ar_ghabtec_vray_lighting	ar_ghabtec_ao

Any comments and feedback would be appreciated, thank you for visiting.

This living room was created for one of our clients and an animated TV ad we did for them but we decided to work more extensively on the room and create an architectural pre-viz for our own portfolio also.

living room 01

Most of the models used are from the Evermotion archmodels collections except for a few like the rug and some other bits and pieces. The project was done in 3DS Max 2009, rendered in Vray and the compositing was done in Fusion.

living room 02

I decided to post an article about Persian CG artists and their works and I decided to start with one of our friends and colleagues, Ali Chenari, and give you a glimpse of some of his work on CGPortfolio where you can see some of his characters which are very unique.

Artemis Giraffe

Ali Chenari is a director and creative artist who also directed our short movie “Baran” and is currently working on improving and increasing his portfolio.

Head over to CGSociety to see a great modeling and shading tutorial by Jeff Miller. Although the tutorial doesn’t get into all details it is still extremely educational and fun and shows us just how a professional like him works and produces his works of art; and art it is! Just observe the level of attention to detail and the artistic vision that has gone into this piece and you’ll understand why the tutorial is so simple and easy to follow.

It’s like watching a champion skater gliding on the ice and the feeling we get that we can do exactly the same thing. Well kids, don’t try this at home!!

Just kidding, but you’ll need a lot of experience and creative juices to make such a character and all of that in 1 WEEK!!! Just goes to show all of us how fast we should be able to work.

Following our last post concerning the modeling of our character called Armin, this is another character from the Persian Warrior series of four characters. Kaam is a ruthless giant who is at a head and neck taller than the other warriors and brandishes a huge sword with golden engravings. He is of royal descent but has become a soldier of fortune after years and years of war and fighting.

This character was modeled, shaded and rendered by Bahram Najand using 3DMax 2009 and ZBrush 3.1 based on concepts by Faraz Shanyar.

Kaam the Persian Warrior Closeup

Kaam the Persian Warrior

We decided to bring low-rez geometry from ZBrush into Max and use displacement maps since the mesh was rather heavy and some of the finer details of the clothing and armour would make the task of importing hi-rez geometry almost impossible.

We bumped into a lot of problems with exporting ZBrush displacements and fine-tuning them for render and we later had to use a hybrid approach where we used some meshes as hi-rez and others were rendered using displacement maps.

A few tests we did with ZBrush 3.5 proved that it was much more adept at exporting and making use of displacement maps but we decided against switching application in the middle of production in order to avoid any more problematic issues.

Call it a hunch or call it experience, but I would seriously advise against switching to a newer version of any application in the middle of production work since it has always caused me serious headaches.

Due to the heavy displacements in this model the rendering took much longer and each frame took 23 minutes on Quad core CPU with 4 Gigs of RAM. We rendered beauty, reflection, specular, ambient occlusion, depth and ObjectID (used to separate layers in composite) passes and composited them using Fusion 5.3.

The next step in the process is to model the two remaining models, Chinoka and Ghob, which you can see in the 3d models galleries and bring the four characters together in a final render.

We are also thinking of creating an environment in Vue 7 and placing the characters in it to test this workflow also.

Any comments and feedback would be highly appreciated.

As promised in the latest post of this series , here is the final model of our game character called Armin, a mythical Persian warrior who clobbers his enemies with his two gigantic maces.

This character was modeled and shaded by Reza Ramezani using 3DMax 2009 and ZBrush 3.1based on concepts by Faraz Shanyar.

Armin warrior character concept

Armin final closeup

Armin final model

The model was textured in Photoshop and rendered using Vray and the whole process took approximately eight working days (we weren’t working on it full time). Most of the process was pretty straightforward except a few problems we had with Vray’s sub-surface scattering material. We were trying to obtain a rather realistic but at the same time stylized look for the skin of the character but we kept bumping into limitations on this shader.

Armin warrior ZBrush model

We had never done sub-surface shading in Vray before and we didn’t have any detailed documentation on the workings of the sss shader so we tried all the parameters and finally decided to use a blend material with the sss shader in one slot and a vray material with the paint map in the other. It worked pretty well and we reached 80% of the result we were trying to achieve and decided to add the rest in post. To do this we rendered another layer of skin using Mental Ray’s Fast Skin shader which gave a very good result and we added this to our character in our Fusion comp.

Here you can see some of the texture maps we used for this model:

Some of Armin’s textures

And the lighting of the scene which consisted of two spot lights, one acting as a key light and the other acting as a rim light. The rest was environment lighting and environment maps.

Armin scene lighting setup

Here you have a screenshot of our render settings but we didn’t really fine-tune these since the render was pretty fast and we were getting a decent result:

Armin’s Vray render settings

These are some of the render passes we used to composite this image. We hope we’ll have the time to rig and animate this character pretty soon and we will give you an update on that as soon as it’s available.

Armin render passes

Aladdin and the Princess riding on the Ghoul’s back

The Aladdin and the Ghoul 3d models are ready and just need to be posed for this image. Since it would take too long to rig and envelope these characters we have decided to use ZBrush to set their poses and then import them into Vue 7 XStream. We’ll give you more updates on our process and the results in the future. Thanks for staying with us.

Hair 3d wolf

This is the first model that was worked on in our hairy animals production tests. The character was modeled in XSI and ZBrush by Reza Ramezani.

The hair was also worked by Reza Ramezani using XSI hair. Texturing was done using ZBrush and Photoshop.

You can see some more snapshots and renders in the galleries sections. The render is done in XSI 6.5 using Mental Ray and takes a LOT of time.

I even made a test render on a quad CPU with 4 Gigs of RAM and a 64 bit XSI but it still took very long. I’m not sure but it seemed as if hair in XSI 6.5 doesn’t use any of the 64 bit capabilities of the application. Most of the passes rendered very quickly on this system but the hair pass took almost as long as the tests on other 32 bit systems. This is one point I’m going to investigate further but if anyone has any suggestions they would be very welcome.

We are currently working on the rigging and animation and will post some updates soon.

We are currently working on a scene which will contains a large field of flowers and vegetation. Currently our effects expert, Adib Souly is working and testing different scenarios in Softimage XSI. You can see a simple concept we did (this was done in a rush by Faraz Shanyar) that was done to help us envision the density and distribution of the vegetation we would need.

But the problem was much thornier than we expected …

We knew from the beginning that there was no way in hell we could create and render such a huge scene which contains camera animation, animated shrubbery and vegetation and millions of polygons without some optimization. We also had a model of a flower we had tested and needed to implement in our scene in numbers as you see in the concept. One other important factor, which was very important to our timing, was that the solution had to be scalable and portable since we had a total of at least 25 scenes which would need to implement the solution and the mere idea of doing it all by hand was painful.

Our first solution was to use Softimage XSI hair in different layers that would constitute our levels of detail. These LOD’s would be created by using a mathematical expression that would link the density of our hair to their distance from the camera. Unfortunately this did not give a very good result in our tests as the number of hairs would not decrease or increase smoothly. Instead it created a sort of procedural animation that we feared would be noticeable in our renders.

The next solution was to use hair again but instead of animating the hair density we decided to create a multitude of hair patches which would have decreasing numbers of hair strands and their position with respect to the camera would be controlled by weight maps which needed to be done manually for each scene. This could obviously create some problems with some of the scenes where the camera animation was more intense but we figured that we could eventually used animated weight maps if the need ever arose.

We decided to use lightweight objects as instances on the hair patches for the layers that would be near the camera and simple hair strands on layers that are further out.

We still had problems with rendering our scenes, we would run out of memory or crash XSI or Mental Ray all the time so we knew we had to look for a simpler solution.

We even did a test on E-On Software Vue 6 but the frame took too long to render and we didn’t have enough experience on Vue to be able to optimize it in time.

The next step in our optimization was to opt for textured sprites of rendered vegetation that would always face the camera still using the hair system. The advantage of such a method would be that we would use much less polygons and even lesser hair strands. In fact, we are still testing this stage and haven’t reached a final solution but the inconveniences of such a solution would be the possible low quality of sprites near the camera or their 2D nature in extreme camera movements. There is a white paper done by Pixar on scene simplification and optimization called Stochastic Simplification of Aggregate Detail which goes into great detail regarding this very problem, but the truth is that this solution was too technical for us to implement and we’re not even sure that it could be easily implemented in XSI due to it’s procedural nature.

For the moment we haven’t reached a verdict yet, but I’ll post our results as soon as we have any.