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’ve been really swamped with work so we haven’t been able to make any updates until today.

This is a preview of the final shading for the main characters.

We’ve been really swamped with work so we haven’t been able to make any updates until today.

This is a preview of the final shading for the main characters.