Sunday, January 27, 2013

Term 7: Portfolio Class Project 1

This term I'm going to update this blog a little differently. Since every two weeks I have to create a portfolio piece, I thought it would be nice to give updates as the projects are completed, rather than one big post at the end of 11 weeks. 

This is the first class our term has taken with Alex Alvarez, the founder of Gnomon. The previous 6 terms have all been leading up to this. Every two weeks in this portfolio class, we have to submit three 2d concepts that we want to recreate in 3d. At least one must be approved, and then it is our choice to model, texture, light, render, and composite one in fourteen days. These were the 3 I selected for the first project. All were approved and I decided to go with Toad, by Yu Cheng Hong, who was nice enough to give me permission to work on it for class.


I had two choices for this project. Either I could try to make a practical symmetrical model that would be able to displayed on a turntable later on and potentially animated, or try to match the concept as close as possible. I chose the latter, which in the end was a little regrettable. I ended up with was a model that can only be viewed from a limited angle, which really defeats the point of 3d. Even so, it was still a very good exercise and I learned a lot about texturing in the process. 


Week 2 was focused on making model changes from our first round of feedback, then we had to complete all the texturing, lighting, and rendering. I had to retopologize a few areas of the toad, especially around the face in the eyebrow region, the arm wrinkles, and the chest wrinkles. Next I unwrapped the model and did a quick texture project to get a base for my texturing, separating the toad on one texture and the fins, eyes, and necklace on another texture. I used Zbrush to fix seams and paint out specular highlights.


Mentalray seemed like the best rendering option since the subsurface scattering shader is a bit better than vray's. The lighting setup included a cream colored background matching the original concepts color, a directional light, and final gather for bounce light. The first round of rendering came out a little washed out, and the subsurface was not as strong as I had hoped it would be. 



Gnomon has a Best of Term competition every quarter and I wanted to submit this before the deadline. The final version is a Photoshop paint over of my first render. I focused on warming up the red color in certain areas, fixing the flatness of the leaves, giving the eyes those flecks of gold that real toads have, brightening up the foot fins, and making him feel more wet and slimy. In the end, I'm really happy with the way it came out. I would like to go back and try to achieve all of these post effects entirely in 3d. Fingers crossed for Best of Term. A big thank-you again to Yu Cheng Hong and a beautiful concept.