Superhero Tutorial

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.

Blur Studio’s New Commercial

Blur Stu­dio, the cre­ators of great shorts such as “A Gentleman’s Duel” and “In the Rough” have recently com­pleted a ten-spot series of com­mer­cials for Pep­peridge Farm Gold­fish crack­ers via Young & Rubi­cam, NY.

Ghobad the Persian Warrior Archer

This is our lat­est Per­sian War­rior char­ac­ter in a series of four. Ghobad is the leader of the group and what he lacks in strength and brute force com­pared to the other war­riors he makes up for it using his cun­ning wits and his excel­lent marksmanship.

Dubai Character and Licensing Fair

I just got back from vis­it­ing the Dubai Char­ac­ter and Licens­ing fair and decided to post a mini-reportage of this fair and inform you of what’s hap­pen­ing here in a series of posts enti­tled “Dubai Char­ac­ter Fair” of which this is the first part.

The fair started on Tues­day 27^th of Octo­ber and goes on till the 29^th but next year the date will be moved by a month and it will start in Novem­ber. The orga­niz­ers decided, and rightly so, that the show was too adja­cent to other impor­tant shows like MIP­COM, which is one of the major events of the year.

Kaam the Persian Warrior

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.

Persian Warriors Characters

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