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.

Ghobad model 01

The model is done by Reza Ramezani using Zbrush 3.1, based on a concept by Faraz Shanyar and it has taken about 36 hours so far for the model alone. We still haven’t moved to Zbrush 3.5 yet but with all the fabulous features it has, we won’t be resisting long. For those of you interested you can read more about some of its greatest features such as Zspheres II and Zsketch on the pixologic website.

Gobad model 02

We will post the shaded and rendered model in future posts on our blog as well as on our CG Portfolio page.

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