Detective and beyond ([fog's WIPping place])

fogmann

I figured I better start posting my progress before I get to the point of messing the model up beyond repair. I'm therefore marking this place as my WIP thread, and hope to fill it up soon.

So here goes WIP on this character I'm putting together, inspired by hardboiled crime fiction and film noir from the 40's and 50's. I started modeling him after Bogart, although I finished him trying to incorporate some features of Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly), but I guess I ended up with a head that doesn't look like neither of the two.

Only the head is textured 1024* C/S/N maps, and it weights 896 tris. Here's the screengrab:


The fedora is in mid poly range [placeholder], and the coat with all the pieces is around million polies (2m tris). The folds, especially in the lower part, still need some warm loving care. I hope to get some comments about building the low poly mesh, since my intention is to hopefully put this dude in the game (probably UT2k7, so I'm aiming for those specs) and not just leave it in portfolio to catch dust. Basically, I'm not sure which bits of the coat would deserve to be modeled out in low poly. The coat has a cut on the back and it's open on the front. I hope I can make a rig with dynamic chain that would be colliding with leg geometry, and hence I'm thinking of building full legs. I'd actually love to make hardboiled detective game noir one day

Here are some renders (legs, hands and shirt collar + tie are still missing - coming soon):







C&C most welcome.

doc rob

That cloth looks really good. Very nice job on the wrinkles. I wouldn't bother trying to do dynamics in Max/Maya unless a rendered movie is your final goal. For game animations you'll run into lots of trouble trying to get ins and outs to match up (like the looping in a run cycle). I did a hybrid system once with spline IK and flex on the splines - the dynamics could be ramped up and down with respect to animator control. Even that was more trouble that it was worth for the average animation. For the most part, the only dynamics animation that's worthwile for games is either simple stuff like follow bones/helper bones/muscle bones, or in-game simulation of the dynamics.

fogmann

Thanks doc rob, and you're right, I was thinking about the rig possibilities for characters with long coats or skirts, and in one instance I decided to just make a short coat instead. But not this time. I did a set up once that involved spline IK controlled with dynamic curve (Maya hair) but I encountered a lot of problems when underlying geometry was poking through in not even so extreme poses. And the looping would look ugly, I agree. I can only hope there is some cool dynamic system in Unreal 3, like what Troika made in VTM Bloodlines, although I doubt there will be such thing, all UT characters are in armors with no flappy parts. So I guess I'll just make the coat without dynamics.

For now, here's some progress on the shoes:

warby

the normal map of the trnach coat looks great the color could use some tweaking ( id making it sigthly darker and a tiny bit less saturated ... TINY bit ^^ )

Ferg

eyes are too big

normal maps lookin great tho

fogmann

Uhm, sorry for confusion, nothing but the head is normal mapped yet, it's hi poly with simple shaders. Textured model should look better with some color variation and whatnot.
Thanks for looking

Neo_God

Nothing like a good Film Noir!

Anyway. As far as crits go, I would round off his chine a bit more, the silhouette is looking a tad too edgy there.

The skin could you some more pigments in it as well. It's coming off a little to pink and plasticy, like his skin isn't real.
Here's a little thing to help out with pigments


Other than that, it's looking pretty sweet.

Asmuel

Awsome stuff man

arshlevon

really nice cloth! the top half of the coat has a bit more polish than the bottom. but its still a great sculpt.

doc rob

hehe, it's funny you mentioned the Troika, the guy who wrote the cloth system for bloodlines works for Mythic now. No cloth for us though, too expensive.

tremulant

Looks really great fogman. I'd say my only crit would be like arsh said the top section of the Coats wrinkles look more crisp, while the bottom is getting a little muddled. This looks excellen tho man, keep posting!

noritsune

cloth indeed looks wonderful. do you think you could post the spec map you are using for the skin here?

EarthQuake

I really like the cloth wrinkles, Tho some parts are looking like they are suffering from either too little geo that makes it look messy, or the inconsistant zbrush brush strokes or something evil like that. Would probably be easy to fix in mudbox =D

AstroZombie

Nice topic and execution. I would love to see some greyscale renders with film noir lighting when you're done with this guy.

fogmann

Thanks everyone for comments.

I made some changes with the head as suggested.
Neo god: I added colorization, but I think it might be a bit too intense, I think I'll tone it down a tad, because his nose looks too red, like he's been drinking too much
Here is a quick render:


Ferg: eyes are smaller a bit.

The lower part of the coat still needs some work, so now that doc rob helped me decide to forget about fancy dynamics for cloth, I'll just have the coat closed, and I'll finish sculpting it. It is actually made of mud, I hear you EQ

Also, here are the head textures, any tips on making them better would be most helpful:
color and spec
Thanks!

Daz

That's great fogmann I love it. Those maps look pretty nice to me. You could still push the contrast/variation more in the colour I think (e.g subtle purple under eyes), and perhaps some of the hair ends need softening? They feel a little brittle. The hair itself could definitely use more colour variation too. If you look at a head of brown hair, it's amazing how much colour variation is actually in there. Take all specular off the coat immediately! Great work.

fogmann

Thanks, Daz. I will most certainly get back to tweaking the textures, good tips, thanks!

The high poly is done. I have no clue how I managed to render this out, it has almost 6 million triangles in one scene file. But after dozens of mental ray crashes I lowered the settings enough, so that I got complete renders at last. Again, only the head has textures, the rest is still high poly with no textures.

character

man, that's lookin real nice. hands are a bit pink tho. dunno if that's still a wip or not tho. keep it up

ScoobyDoofus

That looks top notch Fogmann. Great sculpting on the cloth.

My only gripe is how the hat sits on the head. Somehow doesnt read as real. It looks like a plastic hat on a high-end action figure, as if the hat doesnt quite stretch & deform a little to squeeze down onto the mans head.

Ninjas

Wow, looking nice!

Joao Sapiro

i would desaturate the colors a bit on the face and hands, to match the desaturate look of the jacket ( not that the head must look desaturate ) .

conte

great!=)coat is done in mudbox?

fogmann

Here's something fresh out of the oven - I was baking whole day and I finally got some maps in place. I'm pretty happy with how normal map turned out, although it still needs some manual adjustments, and some extra details here and there, and a cloth texture. The only mirrored parts are shoes and hands. I managed to bake AO for all the parts except for the coat - mental ray couldn't allocate 6 gigs of RAM because I only got 2 And xNormal returned something that doesn't even remotely look like AO map. Oh well, I have displacement at least, so I'll have something to paint from. Oh, and the low poly will be under 5k, I still need to add teeth and proper eyes... speaking of which, I have right now double sphere, one transparent and one indented with a texture, and they are fairly high poly, because I've made them for rendering. What is the best way to make eyes for low poly character? Should I still have double sphere or half sphere, or single layer would be good enough?

Anyways... here:




character + Johny: the texture is on my to do list. Your comments have been noted.

ScoobyDoofus: I fixed the shape and positioning of the hat a bit, I hope it looks better now.

Askhat: Yes, sir.

Thanks all~!

gauss

man, i'm a sucker for noir and all things detective/crime fiction related (finished reading all of Chandler's short fiction and novels not long ago) the arms look a little longish, but that might just be a visual side effect of him having the trenchcoat. in any case, he's looking pretty damn good, keep honing the texture.

though i know this guy's more movie than pulp inspired, i think it's a natural choice to do a beauty render in the style of a detective fiction magazine cover, something along the lines of the great cover art found here:
http://home.comcast.net/~pulpgallery/welcome.html
that or a movie poster. something fun. in any case, looking forward to seeing the finished product

SHEPEIRO

thats cool, the only bit i didnt like was the waist band tie, think it could do with a bit of its own geometry there

Fjornsvavne

Either the arms are too long, or the legs are too short. That's what I think at least. :S Looking good otherwise. ^^

fogmann

That's an awesome link, Gauss, I love those covers! Ha! I will have to do some renders like that, and maybe some black and white ones, as AstroZombie said. I was reading lately a sci-fi noir by Jonathan Lethem, called Gun, With Occassional Music, and it was actually the thing that added a final push to decide about making a detective character. Really cool book, and it has a nice cover too.

Shepeiro, I was thinking the same thing, and I might still add geo and rebake the belt, but only for the part without buckle though, because I think the buckle wouldn't look too good modelled out.

As for the length of arms, it might be that they seem long because the belt is just below the rib cage, while the belt on the pants is much lower. But I'll move the hands up a bit and see if the proportions look any better.

And thanks

EarthQuake

What did xnormal give you for ambocc? Could you post it, i've rendered out many AO maps from xnormal and i might be able to tell you why it messed up.

rooster

if you take the standard rule of where his outstretched fingertips lie when by his side, they should reach halfway down the thigh.. it looks like they reach his knee. I reckon the upper half of him is right, just that the legs are fairly short

I'm absolutely loving the whole piece though, I'm a big raymond chandler fan

fogmann

Hey EQ, thanks for lending me a hand, here is the messed up map. It was originally four times bigger, but it didn't have much more details that you will miss here. The normal map xnormal generated from the two meshes was fine, aside from few missed spots (I can never get the number right for max ray distance, it's at 0.5). For AO, I had 64 ray samples and distribution was set to uniform. Supersampling was disabled, as it was taking way too long.

Thanks, Rooster. Fortunately, it will be easy to extend legs, as they are just floating under the coat.

motives

real nice fogmann! To add what others have said i think his pants are a bit short. Atleast on the back side. Looks a bit steve urkel atm It also looks weird cus of the big fold of cloth on the back of the leg since the bottom part of the trouser is hanging and not resting on the shoe. Why would the cloth bunch up like that then?

fogmann

I guess this is where the "beyond" section of the thread begins. So I was doing some other stuff, and will get back to my detective as soon as I'm done with current polycount comp, and all your comments are taken into account. But in the meanwhile, I would appreciate some feedback on this guy's texture (I didn't make the model, just textures and rendering/lighting + eyes). Photoreal is the goal. There's greyscale bump, double spec (one for very glossy and one for non-glossy areas) and a color map (all 2048*2048).

doc rob

Good job on the textures. One thing I noticed is that the whites of the eyes are too white. They should have some fleshy colors in them. The irises look desaturated as well, and I think even a guy with grey eyes would have some color variation in his irises. I also don't like too much how the dark line that follows the upper eyelid ends abruptly at the ouside corner of the eye.

Great job on the rest, though, no crits there.

EarthQuake

Looks like that ambocc map from xnormal is simply inverted.

fogmann

I'm afraid not

Well, here is what it looks like inverted back, and cropped, to show that there's a sleeve detail cast on top of the UVs that belong to the coat front. It looks like rays were cast from some crazy directions and made all kinds of distortions.

I ended up using the Displacement Map Creator, but it only makes 512x512 maps, which isn't really helping me, as my texture is 2048x2048

Yes, it even occurred to me to cut up my normal map into 16 pieces and convert to displacement piece by piece, but I'd rather ask if anyone knows about some other utility that creates displacement/height map from normal map at input texture size?

poopinmymouth

Write the author, he has one with no texture limit size. Mention you're hot and have boobies and he'll gladly oblige. (same author as CrazyBump)

Daz

very nice indeed fogmann. Perhaps a little too bumpy on the bridge of the nose? Awesome stuff.

fogmann

Wooohooo, CrazyBump did the trick! Thanks Poop, and thanks Ryan Clark, sir, for making the great app.

Doc rob, thanks. I tried addressing issues you mentioned, and so I turned the scattering radius for the eyeball back to zero, as it was bothering me that the white of the eyes appeared to be glowing. The eyeball texture should be more visible now. The irises are photosourced and there was nice color variation, but I think texture filtering has killed most of the detail. Will try to mess with that some more, or try different iris textures. As for the shadows, I really wanted soft shadows, because from the eye reflection you can see that there ought to be large light source, prhaps a window, but that would take forever to render (it already took about half an hour for large versions).

Daz, thanks - yeah, I see now he is a bit too bumpy in some areas.

Here are some more renders:

doc rob

quick paintover:



Note in the photos how the whites of the eye are not actually white, they're just a very slightly paler version of the neighboring skin tones. Color is relative and stuff.

EarthQuake

Foggman: Chances are you just need to mess with the ray distance settings(if its getting the sleeve on the jacket just turn the distance down). Or its posible that your mesh is just too small, xnormal has problems with that. Another thing could be that you have a 2nd uv set getting exported and xnormal is rendering onto that one. Like most programs that generate normals rarely can you just throw the mesh in and get perfect results without playing with a bunch of settings. You could also try setting up a custom cage in the 3d viewer as well.

fogmann

Thanks, doc and per. Yeah, the textures are I think in place for now. I pinched the eyeball detail closer to the center, so there's more veins coming closer to the iris. But from here on it is up to making good render and messing with shaders, and hopefully do a render with high quality raytraced soft shadows, which I'll do overnight. I found that I had to lower the diffuse (not color, Max users, mind you), so it's half way down from .8 which is the default, and only because SSS shader seems to need much more light so that when it gets it, all the other shaders seem overlit. Also, there's different iris texture now. And the bump value is a little lower too. Another thing I changed is the iris shape, now it's convex and has different shading. Finally, I reshaped the tearline a bit, so it is catching more reflection at certain angles. Here:

fogmann

Double post yay.
Thanks EQ, I'll try again, although I got the decent displacement from normal with CrazyBump, so at least I got detail to work from. I know that author of xNormal noted that the max ray distance should be the maximum distance that high poly mesh is away from low poly, but even when I try to make it as close to that as I can, it seems to have troubles with floating geometry.

EarthQuake

Still too white IMO.

EarthQuake

Oh, you might want to try this then: Do 2 renders, one with the min. you can do that still gets all of your base detail, and then a 2nd render thats the max you need to do to get all of your floating details and then just combine them in PS. I've had to do this a couple times.

EarthQuake

Also if anything you can always post in santiago's thread, hes always quick to respond.

fogmann

Good idea, thanks, I'll certainly try that.

fogmann

Wooohooo another double post.
I'm in, I'm in!
Got me a job

Ninjas

Congrats! You deserve it. You've got the mad skillz.

noritsune

congratulations on landing a job, this was a very nice piece.

fogmann

Thanks thanks!
It's at EA Tiburon. Go aligators!

Per, I understand what you're saying, the problem is I don't know how to render it to look the right way. There wasn't much shadow on eyeballs because the light hits from the front and so eyelids don't really make much shadow - to avoid the sharp black line under the upper eyelid. The last thing I am going to try is having eyeballs be SSS shader too, so that at least the eye and face shader respond in the same predictable way to the light. I'm also set to do soft shadow render with better lighting, so hopefully that will create better looking shadows on the eyeballs as well. BTW, I used mostly 3d.sk images for reference, and also sampled them for textures.

Thanks again!

Joseph Silverman

Congratulations on the job, Fogmann.