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.

Motorcycle renders

I've spent pretty much my entire spare time this month rendering the motorcycle that I've been working on. It took a lot of time to try out different materials, lights etc. But it has all been worth it up to this point because I really dig the results so far. Lots of grunge, dirt and attitude.

What I did was I exported the Maya file as an stl and then refined the setup a bit in Blender. Having done that Blender Cycles was used to render all the images. Some images needed higher sampling so I allowed them to render overnight for up to eight or ten hours per frame.

There's still some work to do until I think I'm done with this project. Oh, and I've now edited 55 hours of time-lapse footage down to just two hours. The video only needs to be put together at this point!

I have some more cool angles on my hard-drive but here's some of the finished pieces that I can share.

Haven't decided yet which of the images go to my online portfolio.

I'll post the time-lapse video once I get it done.

I also uploaded the model to Sketchfab. Check out the interactive preview below!

Motorcycle project update

I've been working for the past two weeks on my latest personal project, the Harley WLA 42 motorcycle model. Building up on where I left last time I posted about this piece two weeks ago.

As for the 3D modeling part using Maya I think it's now pretty much all done. The modeling phase took me over an entire month: I started on 30th October and finished today. It's the longest time I've spent working on one single 3D model. I might have went a little overboard with some of the details but oh well.. There's so many little details that just had to be included in the model. I had fun making the parts and at this point I think it looks very satisfying:

It's crazy to think how long time it actually takes to produce quality models.

I tried to work something like two to three hours a day on this project. Some days even longer than that and some days not at all.

I've been pretty busy with other stuff so sometimes things get dragged.

I have now over 50 hours of screen recordings on my hard drive. It covers the whole process of creating the geometry, fixing topology, redoing stuff, searching for reference images and even changing tracks on Spotify.

I'll edit the time-lapse video once I get this whole thing done.

I'm very satisfied with the motorcycle. It looks very accurate while being relatively light 3D model to adjust when necessary. The topology is pretty much all quads with just a few ngons. Overall I think my hardsurface modeling skills have improved a lot. During the last year or so the quality of my work has become pretty solid I think.

Here's more screenshots from different angles:

Next up: shading, lighting and rendering!

Old School Motorcycle WIP

I've been working on a new portfolio piece for the last few weeks.

Since I made the Chevy Impala vintage car last spring I decided to make something in line with that while still totally new and interesting for me:

A high poly version of a Harley WLA 42! A classic motorcycle from WW2 era.

I'm going to make it a truly high poly model with pretty much all the visible details that I see fit.

For example the wheels alone took me something like 6 hours to make. And they're not even perfect duplicates so I had to tweak them individually.

Close-up of the tire detail

The whole thing is still very much a work in progress.

It has been a lot of fun (but frustrating at times) to search for good reference images. And there's always different variations of the same vehicle type so I have to kinda judge what I think looks best.

Still have to find better angles and close-ups of some of the parts like for example the engine. My version of it is still something that I roughly blocked out at the early stages.

I'm using Maya 2014 Student Version for the project. Maya's modeling tools are kinda pain to use but so far I'm fine with it..

Quad view inside Maya

If all goes well there'll be a time-lapse video about the entire process sometime soon.

Purebox visualizations

I promised to post more results from our latest industrial design project and here they are:

Poster design in A1 format, it's huge

As I mentioned in the previous post, the entire object was modeled by me so it was natural for me to make the visualizations as well.
However, I didn't do any of the actual layout, texts, logos, image placement; the graphic design part so to say. CG is my thing.

It's a very graphic and simple poster design and I like it personally a lot. Striking focal point that grabs attention and then some additional information below. It instantly communicates unlike basic studio renders.
My friends didn't have a clue that this sort of thing is even possible to do so at least they were pretty amazed by the result. The splash effect itself was based on an old Blender tutorial that I then modified further. In the end I think this type of imagery suited our concept design very well.

The first thing after importing our model from Creo was to create a simple proxy object to guide the simulation. The proxy object was essentially nothing more than just a cube with rounded corners..
I parented our geometry into the proxy and then keyframed the simplified proxy object. I had made a simple rectangular volume to act as our fluid and adjusted some settings to make the water as high res as possible.
Simulating one second (24 frames) of fluid motion took for a while but was totally worth it.

The 3D view inside Blender

I made sure that the proxy is not rendered, it only guides the motion so to say.
The shaders were relatively simple: different plastics with a glossy component and the water was just a refractive transparent material with the correct IOR of water. I had a wide mesh light acting as an area lamp just outside the frame to provide the main source of light.
Rendering was made using the Cycles path tracer that comes bundled with Blender. Full global illumination with real caustics was used to achieve best image quality possible. (Some visible caustics can be seen on the surface of the object.)
Since we needed a big image for the print it took "a while" to render our image. About 10 hours or so.

The Blender compositor: Sun Beams node highlighted

I had to use the Reduce Noise feature in PS to clear some artifacts, do some sharpening, adjust contrast etc. I used a new feature in Blender called Sun Beams to create the diagonal streak of light coming from above as post processing effect.
This was one of the most complex things I've done in a while. Learned a lot about fluid sims and animating which is always nice.

100% CG imagery

Oh, and I even made a short teaser trailer about our product and uploaded it to Youtube. Even though it is never required to make such videos I think it's fun to show how things work for real.
Besides, I like making videos and stuff.

PureBox - fresh from the 3D printer

Here's a quick update about our portable water purifier project I'm currently working on.

We actually received our 3D printed prototype something like a week ago. I just didn't have the time to write about it yet. But now I do!

Ok, so we do have a name for the concept device: PureBox.

And judging by the look of the final product it's exactly what the name implies: a pure box with rounded edges. However, it's the inner beauty (or complexity) that matters in this one.

Many things have changed from the early versions. The solar panel for example is no more visible on the exterior shell and the light of the UV lamp now shines through a small triangular hole. Overall everything is now a lot more refined than previously.

some of our gorgeous plastic parts

As I mentioned earlier we used Creo to model everything. It's pretty much like any other CAD application, only a bit more advanced than the rest. I guess the main real difference is the fact that every part is inside its own individual file and everything is assembled into one main file in the end.

It's not a surprise that I took further responsibility as the main 3D modeler/visualist in the project. Even though all the decisions were made as a team it was me who created all the extrusions, revolves, cuts and features of each and every part of our model.

Behind the scenes look at our desperate workstations

We had to model all the interior details and decide how we wanted to approach making them. One thing we had to keep in mind was to make it as easy as possible to mould and manufacture even though we're only making a 3D printed plastic prototype. Technically we could print almost anything but it would not be very reasonable in the real world..

It certainly was pretty difficult to come up with all the things for the nuts and bolts while making sure that everything fits where they belong. Luckily it was pretty easy to alter the dimensions when we suddenly wanted to change things. It's very different to work with such high precision rather than eyeballing the designs when making visualizations. We went as far as arguing about the proper dimensions down to one tenths of a millimeter just to get everything right. The thing is that there's no one solution or a true value for any given thing. It's all about what we think might work and then we try it out and see what comes out of it.

I have to say that this assignment has improved my overall CAD/hard surface modeling skills a lot.

Now it seems almost too easy to just create the outer surfaces of objects when doing 3D models for illustrations, games etc.

Here's a few screenshots I took of our part files:

Exploded view of our prototype

But yeah, we managed to get everything ready for printing and delivered the triangulated STL files for printing. I was very happy with the quality of the prints and everything went surprisingly smoothly. I even tried to assemble all the components one night at home just to see how everything fits inside. And they do fit.

Testing the assembly

It's insane to think that it was less than three weeks ago when we had only early drafts for the project and now we're pretty much done with the prototype. I'll post more about our final renders and presentation sometime very soon.