Iron Man MKZ Armour
The above is a promotional image we did for the upcoming release of the Iron Man MKZ Armour short.
My good friend and fellow colleague at Sony, Anthony McGrath started this project over a year ago when he decided to make his own carbon fibre version of the MK5 (suitcase) suit in Iron Man 2. Needed to say he wasn't happy stopping there and before he knew it, it had turned into a full blown animation. Since then I myself was pulled in to help bring RDJ to life as early showings revealed that it just didn't feel the same without him.
All the work is completely one laptops and what little time we have outside of work. We still have plenty left to do, but this should hopefully keep you all involved along the way
Facebook Page
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Iron...5515492?fref=ts
Iron Man MKZ Armour Thread
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthr...4&page=11&pp=15
Tony Stark Making of Thread
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=153&t=1099780
I've attached links and a few other pictures for you guys to peruse at your leisure. Any support for our work would be greatly appreciated.
The hair is all generated using fibremesh in zbrush because it gave me the best results and most control. I have been extremely keen to have everything visible and runtime in Maya when animated so I painstakingly took the time to model all the creases into the topology. This means that by driving the facial rig with joints I can control the hair without having to combine it to the head mesh like I would with blendshapes. On top of this I have created all the wrinkles and secondary motion using blendshapes driven by the GUI so you will get fully displaced mesh wrinkles within the viewport rather than having to wait until render time.
Quick render showing the early stages of the facial setup and wrinkle prototyping. The primary facial deformation is created using joints as all the hair is geometry based and therefore would have to be combined in order to use blendshapes. The secondary deformation likes wrinkles is all blendshape driven as the use of displacement maps mean you can't view the results realtime. This was painstaking because all of the topology needed to follow the wrinkles, but will be worth the extra effort in the end. You can see an example of this in the brows narrow where the skin dimples in above the eyebrows and on the brows up where the forehead creases.
Finally some screenshots from the actual short film sequence and a breakdown of one of the shots.
Shot Breakdown
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=532921646744815
Replies
other than that, badass man =]
Hey thanks for the response. Yeh I pulled the eyes back in a made a few tweaks recently which you can notice in the close up render of his face with the black background, but unfortunately all the others are old renders so they still stick out a lot :P
Thanks MrNinjutsu, it was a lot of trial and error to begin with. I tried maya nhair to start with, but the render time was fairly large and didn't have much control over styling individual hairs. The same went for shave and a haircut, maya paint effects and even just poly modelling it from splines. My friend then pointed me in the direction of fibremesh and I was completely amazing at what I could achieve in about 10 minutes. It allowed me to control the density of hair and then just simply brush it into place, so much so that I just sat there with a picture of RDJ and brushes his individual brow hairs and facial hairs into the correct direction and twist. Then it was just a case of exporting it back to maya as single sided polys that get subdivided on render. The shaders for the hair are just 3 different blinn with a fresnel pumped through the incandescence to emulate an edge softening. The first is the main colour, the second is a lighter shade to break it up and the third is grey hairs. All have a specular, but no reflections.
Here are some early maya grabs
Well I didn't make the armour so I'll pass on the interest to Ant and I'm sure he'd be happy to come on here and help with any questions
hi Archang:
have a scout at this thread i set up a while back - goes into a fair bit of detail about the iron man armour i put together:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=1053724
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/61195028/ironmanCFpics/im_su_handsCU_strip.jpg
I mean come on , this is like 5 sided for half a cylinder.
And wow your hair, thats insane!
Thanks for your input.
Thanks for your input.
Thanks Kend, the feedback it really appreciated
Kinda agree with Shrike there, unless you intended the armor to look that way. Otherwise, it still looking awesome.
And about Tony Stark, i think a lot of people already know what i'm going to say. It's perfect.
Good job, guys.
when you say single sided polys, do you mean they are just polygon strips and not actualy cylindrical hair shapes ? would like to see wireframe close up of the hair. also what is the polycount of the hair mesh ?
anyways, only thing i can comment on seem to be the facial anatomy. the eye sockets or eye lids look really off right now. they almost look like the eyeballs are pushed forward too much. they should be set deeper into the skull and the bone surrounding the eye should be slightly more prominent. they jaws should also be slightly lower.
look at the image below and see how far your eyes are sticking out compared to this:
http://cdn03.cdn.justjared.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/sherlock-downey/sherlock-robert-downey-jr-holmes-16.jpg
OK so here a version with the eye reflections and refractions actually turned on this time :P
Thanks again for the feeback guys. I think his eyes are quite deceptive. I've only recently pulled them back and you'd be surprised just how set in they are. I think the focal length and angle doesn't really help. Although his left eye is slightly different to his right as in real life it's a bit bulgier and higher. I've attached a side profile wireframe for you guys to looks at
As for the jaw this was also another awkward one as in the image you posted his mouth is slightly pulled up due to the slight expression he is pulling at the edges of his mouth and the absence of his facial hair also adds to the illusion. Here is an example of how different his jaw can look in a relaxed position with facial hair compared to a slight expression without.
http://images.askmen.com/celebs/men/entertainment_200/214_robert_downey_jr_-906173-large_image.jpg
My own personal concerns lie around his lips. I can't seems to get a nice closed feeling to them. The problem is that he is fully animated so it opens, closed and all the rest, meaning at a resting closed position there is very little I can do other than some blendshape work. Any suggestions?
As for the hair, yes and no. They are flat strips, but rather than being single sided zbrush exports them as double sided so essentially 2 polys with opposite normals in the same world space. By smoothing on render by 1 iteration they automatically become 4 sided though like a piece of paper being folded flat then pulled up to make a cube with no ends. And as they are individual hairs a normal blinn specular works wonders rather than having to use an anisotropic shader.
Head hair is 298005 faces or 596010 tris
Brows are 3559 faces or 7118 tris
Beard is 35136 faces or 70272 tris
Maya seems to have no problem with these polys as they animate in the viewport fairly smoothly in texture mode.
Thanks Jimmy. Yeh it's tough to judge from the screenshots of the arms really as when they are in motion they look pretty good which is the main aim. The angles themselves are indeed by design though as you can see on the arms of the iron man suit walking towards to camera. I think it's just a shame that it looks like low polys in that screenshot. Nevermind eh
This.
The suit was always meant to have an angular look in places.. i agree with shrike altho his way of wording had me irritated.. I don't think he realises the monumental effort this piece has been. also its alot easier to grill one frame of a shot.
Fact is that shot is literally about 36 frames of a 2 minute short. It was significantly improved when Mark added his high res arms in. I've never been fully happy with that one shot tbh but perhaps shrike is right and it does need a little adjustment certainly for that shot. i am still in the process of lighting some shots and getting the materials to really pop with hdri lighting so there is more to come yet.
Ant
in all of the movies, when RDJ has the helmet half open, his face is digitally squashed into it. there are a couple of shots where it really shows, and especially the scene at the end of Avengers when he's stood over loki with the helmet off completely. it looks ridiculous.
there's also a blooper scene on the bluray which shows him struggling to get the helmet on. and in the cg reel for ironman 3 they show how they overlay the armour digitally and that it doesn't actually fit "around" a head, it fits in front of it as a superimposed image, including with the mask open.
so, the solution to this for you, is to either scale the helmet so it's a bit narrower, or scale the suit so it's a bit chunkier, or both
Its the right scale.
Can you show me a video with rdj's face being squashed digitally into the suit? i think Mark will back me up when i say I've obsessed over so many iron man making of videos for the last year+ doing this work lol.
The suit is deliberately skinnier like the mk5 suitcase suit is.. The whole sequence features the suit deploying in his car so room is tight heh!
i do like the 'sweaty' hair look on him in that concept tho
thought i'd put this up as i know all the polycountpeons like a good wireframe heh!
1
initial first pass animatic... not worrying too much on the 'how' ..just concentrated on seeing if the main high level idea could carry through in an animatic... my thoughts were i wouldn't necessary have to show every nut & bolt winding in (leave that to the movies!) but with carefully chosen shots maybe the idea of in-car-suit-up would work...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmTSPcyOvYY
2
i then did a slightly more refined version of the animatic concentrating mainly on the suit-up sequence... you can see that i concentrated on that final shot mostly for a good while whilst i tried things out for the other close up shots...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEgT0pEq4f8
3
further working into the various shots brought it up to this level... by now i'd got a face rig i was happy to turn into my Tony Stark. This was all still prior to Cushers there coming on board and building a proper RDJ model... it just HAD to be him... he IS iron man
I'd sourced some models off turbosquid for the Zenvo and the F14 - these needed considerable tidy up mind to get them to look half decent but i think they are good enough for the shots i use them for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVebkN1kPWA
*fun fact - did you know when the Navy retired the F14's and the other 'teen' jets of the 90's, the gov's apparently then sold them onto middle eastern countries - thats why i figured the F14 would make a good 'terrorist attack' jet... in the final sequence it has a big fat red stripe down it and the Ten Rings logo on the wings.
and finally here's a shot breakdown for you...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI4S5OUprOY
enjoy/ignore
put up a link to a photo your comparing him to ?
eyelid thickness aswell possibly?
its just eyes, Im very funny with eyes as thats where you first look when you look at people and is the first place to break the realism if its off. To be fair theres not enough shots to give a proper critique and could be a perspective issue, but worth looking into. You've also gotta deal with which version you do, Downey jr. is alot skinnier/older/toned in the later movies so almost has a different face if you are doing likenesses.
like look at this chubby face haha
great project though guys, its looking really good
I won't be putting up anymore renders for the time being though as we really need to get it integrated now, so once the face rig is finished I'll upload a fully rendered turn table and wireframe etc.
here is a 3d scan data model i believe:
http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-model-head/739445
also, notice the curvature of the eyelids. your eyeballs look too flat (not rendering issue), may be the eyeballs are too big on your model.
I'm dubious whether it is a scan. I can see the accuracy of some of his features, but I work with scans on a daily basis and if that is a high end film scan then it's by far the worst I've seen and I doubt it would be on turbo squid. Regardless of whether it is or not he is pulling a fairly extreme expression unfortunately so this will influence it a lot. This is an actual scan though. I've had this a while. I agree there appears to be more curvature to the eyes, but mostly because he has them wider in the scan. I could possibly thicken up the lower lid, but I can say with a certainty my eyeballs are not too big. I'm just having trouble getting the reflections and refractions to show up nicely.
I don't have time for a proper render, but here is a quick blast from a different angle so you can see the eyes etc
the corners of the eyelids never change location whether wide open of shut. the curvature would be same regardless as far as i know.
anyways, since you are using scan data i believe you will get it as accurate as possible. rest of it might be rendering issue.
i'm 99.9999% sure that was made using still shots from a movie and software like Autodesk 123D
Mark has more than enough reference image for this guy and the proportions are bang on the look of rdj from avengers id say which is exactly what he wanted to shoot for.
Also base pose non expression face always looks a little dead.
He's looking good
You nodder
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Iron-man-Mk-Z-armour/478669665515492?ref=ts&fref=ts
Here are a few more head shots to keep you entertained including a "post-crash" render
here's a render and composite behind the hud...