Vishka Studio Blog

Kaam game character finalized

Posted on 13. Oct, 2009 by Reza Ghobady in Lighting, Rendering, Shading

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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.

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Tags: Kaam, Persia, Persian, persian mythological character, persian warrior, Zbrush