The semester is over, one to go

saschagongala
Dec 21, 2015
2 min read

This semester one of my modules allowed me to work on my short film. Two characters needed to be created, a digital double of Pete Ramsay, who plays the main character and the alien robot he has to fight.

The first character I worked on was the robot. I already worked on it over summer so I had a head start. I took a lot of time to figure out the designs and tried a few new techniques to get more original results. Here are some of the scetches:

These sketches were just a starting point. Once I reached a certain point in the modeling process, I took screenshots of the mesh and painted over it to add more detail.

To get a lot of detail in the textures without having a lot of time to work on them I chose to use automated processes. I used Substance Painter to created every texture on the robot. For rendering I decided to work with the AlShaders for Arnold. These are some of the results:

The second half of the semester I spent working on Pete´s digital double.

In the process of UV Mapping I wrote a MEL script that executes the workflow I used before in one click of a button. All I have to do is select the edges I want to cut the UV shells along and click :).

This enabled me to lay out all the UVs in less than on day.

The texturing was done in Mari and Photoshop. It was my first time trying to create skin, so I had to go back to edit the textures quite a few times during the shading process. For the hair I used Fibermesh in ZBrush and XGen. I exported curves and assigned hair systems to them. This has been the first time I worked with hair as well. In the beginning the curves coming from ZBrush were too uniform, so I wrote a script that randomly offsets the CVs of each selected curve (except for the first one). Additionally I ran a simulation on the hair to break it up even more. The double is still work in progress, but here is a look at what I have so far: