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.

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

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.