Look Development

Look development of 3D assets

MOH Blocks Image

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I created this scene for my old flash website moh3d.com, which is still up actually.  It’ll be going bye bye soon though.  The design of this site is a bit of a homage to my old one.  This was a relatively simple scene.  Most of my time was spent texture painting the blocks.  It’s a pretty straight forward setup as can be seen in the image below.

I set things up with a limited number of scalar maps and masks.  I mixed and modulated the maps in Maya with procedurals to generate all of the attribute maps that I needed, including displacement.  The final image, below.

I used Maya, Arion and Photoshop for all my texture work.

 

-m

The Story Behind Mike’s Apartment

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I created this image a few years back after flipping through my copy of the Art of Monsters Inc.  I loved the art in this book, but  I was really blown away with the depth of mood and color that Dominique Louis was able to capture with his pastel sketches.  There was one particular image that surprisingly captured my attention though.

I say surprising because it wasn’t the most beautiful, or the most detailed or the most colorful image.  Nor was it the most beautifully rendered or thought provoking piece of Loius’ that appeared in the book.  At least not in the traditional sense.  I guess it struck me for the same reasons that many other pieces in the book had.  While the sketch was able to pull me in to a high degree, it was more effective at getting me to wonder about everything in the space that the camera was not seeing.  The wider space that was only hinted at.  The super bright light, piercing through the darkness from the stairwell below, suggested a place from which they came.   The warm light silhouetting the other worldly details of the upper landing gave them a place to go, along with the door at the top of the stairs.  Perhaps Mike, and God know what else, was waiting for them on the other side of that door.

I saw Monsters Inc. and loved it.  Pixar did a great job of making sense of how the monster world worked and differentiating from the human world.  Not for a moment, did I question where we were in the story.  But as I flipped through the Art of book that day, it was these worlds that I wanted to see brought to life next.  So, I thought to myself… “Wouldn’t it be neat to flesh one of Louis’ pastel sketches out in 3D.”  I immediately focused on the sketch above.  As I alluded to before, Dominique Louis is a master of texture, color, mood and lighting.  Strong lighting is one of the many tools that he employs to emphasize mood more immediately.  He often uses bright stark soft neutral lighting to convey a lack of mood or pockets of colorful light punctuated by long dark shadows to evoke fear or danger.  This is nothing new really.  These are techniques that have been used in visual storytelling for quite some time.  But for me, to see an artist so effectively employing these tools in a subject and a media that I care so much about was really moving.

The first thing that I did was to bring the concept art into Maya and converted the 2D space into 3D.  I first matched the 3D camera to concept art then I  began creating a basic layout using low res geometry to block in the space.  From there, I further refined the geometry to do the initial set dressing of the shot.  I later created additional camera angles once the environment was further fleshed out.  I originally called this project “Sully’s Stairwell” for obvious reasons, but it’s actually a stairwell leading up to Mike’s apartment.  At the time, I thought it would be neat to create Sully and Boo as pictured in the early concept.  Maybe I’ll revisit that idea one day just for kicks.

From that point, I modeled, texture mapped and shaded the final assets.  For the door, I borrowed from the door design that was actually used in the movie.  Above is a close-up of the door (rendered in Mari).  I used my clay set dress model to do the initial lighting and refined the light using the final assets with their materials in place.  I chose not to go with super low key lighting for the simple fact that I wanted to show more shader detail.  I actually regret that decision in hind sight and wish I had remained to committed to the original sketch.  My concern at the time was that such a stark 3D rendering could not hold up on its own out of the context of the original sketch.  I still believe that but I do wish I had taken the chance at that time.  I used Maya, Relight and Renderman (REYES) to generate the images.  I used volumes for atmosphere and Maya particles for floating particulate matter and dust.  I composited everything in Nuke.

One note about the final images, a couple of other things I would change about this scene is that I went waaaay to far with the bump on the procedurally shaded girder in the final scene renderings.  Also, I wish I had blown out the lower stairwell more in the second rendering of the scene to come close to the orginal sketch.  Aside from that, I really enjoyed following Louis’ footsteps and getting closer to of his work.  I just thought it would be neat to see some of Pixar’s early concept work fully fleshed out in CG.  It really gave a lot of insight into what processes maybe undertaken and what considerations may be explored to bring a 2D scene into the 3D world.

-m

Beagle Pup Look Dev

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I’m currently working on a new project that will be used to promote some future work.  It’s a rather large piece consisting of a few environments as well as a number of characters.  The project is stylized in full CG and I’ll be uploading samples here on my blog as work in progress.  This is one of the first assets to be completed.  It’s a beagle pup that I modeled, texture painted, groomed, shaded, lit and rigged.  The pup was first sculpted  and UV’d in ZBrush and later refined in Maya.  Above is a shot of the pup as seen in the projects look dev lighting scene under neutral light.

Above, is my main piece of reference.  In the interest of time, I pulled all my reference and texture from online resources like Google Images.  In spite of the low quality of many of the images, I knew I could combine a number of photos to create a complete high res texture set for the pelt using texture projection techniques.  I did all of my projects in Maya instead of Mari because Maya’s camera projection workflow is a bit more robust and allows for finer tuning and faster iterations.  I was actually able to use the reference image above to paint most of the side of the dog.  I gathered rendering with the textures after some processing would be pretty forgiving, considering, that most of the dogs body would be covered in soft fur.  Using photo based textures in the first place always results in more believable surface materials; even with something as soft as fur.  There’s subtleties in the piling of the various colored hairs in a pelt that are hard to replicate procedurally or with hand panted textures alone.  The latter methods tend to lack the organic patterning and qualities found in the real world.

Anyway, here’s how I did it.  I quickly rigged the model and posed it in a similar manner as the dog in the reference photo.  That’s the final production model pictured above.  I then brought the above reference photo into Nuke after flattening the lighting and cleaning up the jpg artifacts in Photoshop.  I then grid and curve warped it to better match the posed dog model as best as possible before upres’ing the texture in Nuke.  I then brought the Nuke rendered texture into Photoshop for a bit of clean up and then projected that texture onto the dog in Maya and baked it out.  I did this with a few photos from different angles which gave me enough coverage to cover the dogs entire body.  With this technique, I was able to extended the resolution of the original images quite a bit and preserved detail throughout the projection process.  With multiple projections, I was able to fill in areas like the underbelly, under the jaw, the inside of the ears and the dogs backside as well as the bottom of his paws and around his mouth.  I then brought in the projected set of photos, blended and cloned them in Mari to create the full pelt.  The resulting pelt was my base for further texture painting.

From my base texture, I ultimately generated two base color maps.  One for shading the dogs body, and the other, a lower resolution flat color texture for the actual fur coat color.  It actually helped the “believability” of the fur to soften the coat color and knock back of some the fur detail.  The larger color map for the pups body generally consisted of two layers.  The fur color (slightly softened at original resolution) as the top layer.  And a hand painted skin layer underneath.  To create the  underlying skin color layer, I first created a skin base layer in Mari using a texture repeat created from photos of pig skins.  I flooded the base layers with a tiled texture of the pig skin.  I then went in and painted additional detail using a combination of procedurals, projected photos and hand painting techniques.  I then created a set of blend maps to combine the two layers to create the pelt for the body.  The end result was a body material that supported the groom well and gave the groom a fuller appearance.  It also made for better blending where the fur begins to thin out revealing the pups skin underneath.

From those two base color maps, I then quickly generated the remaining maps like normal, masks, ISOs, spec, sss, fur density, a base fur length and roughness.  I then used the fur maps in XGen in Maya after processing them in Mudbox to create the final groom.  In the end, the final materials consisted of intuitive layers of photo based maps and masks combined with 2D procedurals in Maya.  The images were rendered with Redshift.  Render times with 4 Geforce GTX 1080s is around 4 mins with full production settings at 1600 x 1200.

-m