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.