Breaking radio silence

It's been a long and quiet four months on the blog frontier.. Fact is that I've been working on CG related stuff during the past spring/summer time more than I ever have. Looming deadlines everywhere and long working shifts can really take its toll. That's why I haven't always had the need to sum up my thoughts in literal form.

So what I've been up to for all this time?

For a start, I did my two and a half month internship in a Helsinki based VFX house called Talvi Digital. They do advertisements, commercials for mobile games and post production for films, all kinds of cool stuff.

I had the honor to participate on many interesting projects working as a 3D modeler.

Right now I'm continuing as a freelancer for the company on some undisclosed projects.

If that was not enough, I was also involved in a student short film project from the end of April till the end of June. Had the responsibility to create up to 20 effect shots all by myself from scratch. The deadline for such a large post production task was extremely tight but somehow we pulled it off. All the work I did was done with Blender 3D: tracking, creating the actual set extensions, compositing etc. I will post an effects breakdown reel once I get it done.

Here's my VFX breakdown of some of the best shots from the short film:

Some more making of material (in Finnish only):

https://goo.gl/1f9s5P

I did a complete overhaul to my online portfolio and the focus is now purely on 3D art/modeling.

Check it out:

http://www.ilmarisaari.com/

Another cool little thing worth mentioning is that I bought a book called The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. It's a great read recommended by many and the book has been on my wish list for a long time. There's lots of valuable knowledge to be gained + some example frames from cool blockbuster films and tv-shows including Return of the King, Revenge of the Sith, Sin City, King Kong and Lost.

Since I've been so busy I've managed to read only half of the book. Hope to finish it sometime soon.

I guess that's about it this time; can't wait to share all the new exciting stuff in the not-so-distant future.

Vintage Telephone 3D model

Decided to upload the vintage telephone model from my femme fatale project to Sketchfab. For the site's real-time purposes I had to bake a couple texture maps for the global illumination using Cycles. There's even some actual environment reflections in the scene; it's a real treat to use Sketchfab's own editor nowadays. Feel free to check out the model in interactive 3D.

 

Vintage Telephone by Ilmari Saari on Sketchfab

I've headed to some very exciting new territories during the last few months. Right now I'm working on something that's going to be so cool once it's finished. More on that later.

'Femme Fatale' renders

So what's changed since I posted last time about this?

Well, pretty much everything:

The final render

I ended up with this particular composition that I felt told the best story. It allows multiple different interpretations about the situation: is she about to call someone or has she just heard something awful via the phone.

It was fun to create a real vintage telephone from scratch. I used some references of early telephones from the 1920s but my version is not any specific model. It's a combination of features that I think looked the best.

An early wireframe. Notice the minor differences.

After finding the right direction, I decided that I need an armchair for the character to sit on. So I modeled one myself. It's a relatively simple piece but making the imperfections and the ropes on the seams was something that took a while to create.

I also had to tweak the things that the character is wearing. The pieces of jewelry are now much more distinguishable which makes her have a much more elegant vibe. Even the dress of the character is entirely different than in the previous posts. Long story short I made a more detailed version and sculpted the wrinkles by hand.

There's even a 3D modeled cigarette that the character's holding and some faint smoke effects in the scene. One particular reason for that was that I wanted to make use of the new smoke rendering capabilities in Cycles. I made the effect by using the wind and turbulence force fields inside Blender.

Here's a look behind the scenes:

Tweaked GLSL viewport view

One thing that was particularly challenging was finding the right pose for the character. Many of the poses felt very stiff and it is easy to end up making the character look entirely lifeless. I had to for example tweak the arms of the character with shape keys to fix some minor issues that was caused by the rig. It's a pretty decent pose in my opinion but not a perfect one by any means...

I put together a small collage of various different test renders that I grabbed last month. It shows how I refined the new direction one small adjustment at a time.

Look development

Low Poly Environment

Made a quick low poly modeling and texturing exercise using Blender last week. The environment was based on a rough conceptual drawing found via Pinterest. It's actually a work in progress still, trying to finish it in the coming weeks.

I modeled the assets quickly using as much duplication as much as possible. Then I painted all the textures by hand. The bricks were made using a tileable texture while everything else had unique UVs. The scene was rendered with simple diffuse materials lit by a HDRI map. I should make more of these video game type pieces in the future. It was fun.

Closeup

shaded

wireframe

New CG Books

Got two new CG books from Amazon this week. The other is about 3D package Modo and the other about After Effects CS6. Good stuff!

Ok, so the first one is called Building 3D Models with Modo 701. It's not a thorough guide into everything about Modo and not even about the most recent version but a good starter nonetheless. It covers things such as navigating the interface + basic modeling, shading and lighting tools. Little over 214 pages it was the best one I found for the price. 

I have also been watching Modo tutorials at Digital Tutors recently. The workflow is obviously same as in every other modeling app but it takes time to convert hotkeys/menus and old habits from one to the other. However, I do think I'm starting to get a hang of it.

The second book is a couple of years old book called Adobe After Effects CS6 Classroom in a book. It's an official Adobe release and seems pretty informative. I've been thinking for such a long time to get a grasp on After Effects. It seems that AE knowledge is pretty valuable these days and it could be helpful in my own projects too. The book's just over 375 pages so there's a lot to find out about.

Now I just need to find the time to read both of these actually!

Character progress

It's been over a month since I actually posted about my character project. I've been extremely busy with school and other things but I've managed to make steady progress with the piece nonetheless.

Having finished the character modeling earlier this month I started painting the diffuse textures. I used actual skin textures and images by using the projection painting technique inside Blender. Note that the texture is quite saturated because my lighting/shader setup washes away most of the color.

Texture painting in Blender

Here's a high resolution test render of the skin shader. The setup was nearly done at this point and I had already started playing around with eyebrows/eyelashes. Notice the spooky placeholder eyes in the image, hah.

Skin shading test

After that I had to create hair for the character. It consists of multiple particle systems so they all required countless hours of tweaking. There's individual elements for top and bottom eyelashes, eyebrows and two different "layers" for hair. To get the curly effect of the hair I had to comb individual guide hairs and then use simple child particles to fill out the rest of the scalp. The result turned out pretty nice and I think the hair looks good in my tests.

Hair editing

Once I had the basic character done I started to mess with my lighting setup. I studied lots of 20s/pinup photography and aimed for contrasted imagery with strong backlighting. I was amazed by my test results partly because I used actual film emulation inside Blender. The images suddenly started to look much more cinematic and well, insanely cool in my opinion.

Lighting test with internal film emulation

I used rigify to quickly pose the character and started playing with poses and different expressions. What I did notice was that the character seems a bit generic at the moment. For example the jewelry is barely visible right now and I would like it to be much more striking in the final image. The dress is very simple and I have to make something better from scratch. I also started modeling props for the scene. There's more elements than the simple accent table that I'm planning to make. A draped curtain and an old vintage telephone possibly?

The image in its current form. More work needs to be put on composition and lighting.

I hope to finish this project sometime soon now that I have more time to focus on it. I have some insanely cool and exciting things awaiting once the spring/summer kicks off. In preparations for that I'm going to learn a bit of Modo and maybe Fusion/After Effects.

Sketchup experience

I had the chance to do a minor study course focusing on Construction Drawing at Aalto University's department of Film, Television and Scenography this week. It was the second part of the course and it focused on virtual set design using Sketchup while the first week was mainly about doing technical drawings by hand which I also attended. I've never really used Sketchup so it was interesting to give it a shot finally. While simple to use I think Sketchup has some pretty handy features: The Push/Pull workflow is really intuitive and I like the extensive use of keyboard shortcuts. But then again for example the lack of bezier curves makes it good for drawing pretty much architectural shapes only. However, it was fun and I learned a lot. We used an extension called Layout for Sketchup which allows you to export 3D scenes into various 2D layouts. Here's my final layout presentation:

We had sketched our own inital set design ideas that we then translated to Sketchup. I put a lot of effort into my work and was pretty satisfied with it overall. It was also fun to play around with animating the scene.

I made different setups inside Skethup with section planes that cut the entire model in half based on an axis. The final animation was made by interpolating between these views.

Anyway, here's the finished piece:

Until next time.

Character WIP from today

I started working on a whole new project this week. Thought it would be interesting to attempt character modeling once again. I'd like to try out and learn some new things by playing around with hair rendering and skin shading using Blender Cycles. Something different than same old product viz and vehicles for now.

I've spent my time modeling the head and body of this very specific female character. Lots of work ahead since everything has to be made from scratch: clothing, props etc.

These are still very much work in progress shots and all subject to change.

Bust with a simple clay material

Blocking the head

Moving on to the body

Time-lapse video and about textured model

I have the time-lapse video finally up on youtube:
Vintage Motorcycle Modeling Timelapse - Autodesk Maya 2014

I was asked to upload the textured version of the vehicle online so I spent a couple of nights just baking the textures. It basically involves creating a set of UV maps and then transfering the shading in the given scene onto the texture maps. Not an easy process but I gotta admit that the model looks so much more impressive with the textures than without:

Rigged model inside Blender ready for export

I went as far as to create a simple rig for the motorcycle with custom widgets.  It has only the necessary controls but allows some simple posing of the model.

Here's the project page for the motorcycle on my online portfolio with many high detailed renders:
Hard Surface - Motorcycle

I uploaded the textured version to Sketchfab and it can be viewed below:

The model even got staff picked by the Sketchfab crew! So far this is my most succesful 3D model to date. I've been playing around with the idea of 3D printing this thing... Would be challenging though but we'll see.