Resurrection

Don't worry I'm not gonna start talking about religion, unless you pray to the gods of C.G. Seriously though, this project was a chance for me to gain a deeper knowledge of modeling and animation within Maya, But, it evolved into so much more. I suppose I better start at the beginning as thats as good as any.

The brief was to take one of the following words:

Resurrection

Simple Simon

Inquisitive Lola

Panther

The Professor

Then design and model a character then animate them in a run cycle using Maya. Sounds easy right? Well, I will let you make your own mind up as you read on.

Design

The eagle eyed people amongst us may have already guessed that I chose resurrection as my theme. As with any project I usually brainstorm some ideas using a spider chart. It helps me get all my thoughts down on paper quickly and not worry whether the initial idea is good or bad.

Let me just say that reference images are THE most important thing you need when starting a design, for this project alone I must have looked at over a hundred images of human anatomy, bird anatomy, art, etc... Basically anything that had the slightest bit to do with the theme of the project. from this research I found that when you base the physical appearance on known physiology it will make for a more realistic and believable model. I know that I want some kind of humanoid body with claws for the hands and feet with some kind of birds head and large wings. After many drafts and sketches I finalized my design.

Modeling

Using the image as a guide in Maya I blocked out a base mesh that could be sculpted in zBrush and laid out the UV's.

The model was output as a .obj file and imported into zBrush where I sculpted the face to this point. Using some feather alphas I added detail to the face. The problem was that the head just didn't fit with the rest of the design, I really felt that instead of looking like a bird it was starting to look more like a rat.

You see I didn't listen to my own advice and base the head on known physiology. With this in mind I took the model back to Maya and created another head based on an eagle which gave a much better overall look to the character. Also at this point I sorted out the UV's as there was problems with them overlapping in places.

Using Zbrush I finalised the musculature of the body keeping in mind the human anatomy studies that I had done earlier. I know its not perfect by any means but as a first attempt to sculpt anatomy while learning to use zBrush it definitely shows potential. Also the head was sculpted to the point where I felt that it flows well with the general shape of the body.

From this sculpt I then exported the lowest sub division as an .obj file and also created displacement and normal maps which were used in maya to give the model the same shape as above at render time. For those of you who are unfamiliar with displacement maps, I'm not going to tell you how to use them, there is plenty of resources on the internet for that especially zBrushcentral.com. Let me just tell you that they are the biggest pain in the a** ever, but the results you get with them are simply quite amazing.

Wing Design

If I never have to model another feather in my life it will be too soon, honestly I have never had so many sleepless nights. But it was all worth it for the end result which you will see a little further on. I employed many different techniques when trying to create a realistic feather and if it wasn't for a very smart lecturer named Martin I may still be trying to do it now. You see by this point of the modeling process I had fallen into the trap of thinking that zBrush was the answer to my prayers. My dilemma was how do I get all the detail of a feather on a C.G. feather? Well, zBrush lets you use millions of polygons per model so why not sculpt the detail. Now while in theory this sounds like a good idea trust me when I say that it is not. I set of sculpting around 50 feathers or so thinking that they looked the business only to find that on second opinion they looked nothing like a real feather. You see a real feather is thin and soft whereas the ones I was making looked thick, chunky and rough. The point I am trying to make is that you don't need to go mad with the modeling process to achieve great results. It is only one part of the process in making a model. This is where Martin came to my rescue and put me out of my misery with the greatest piece of advice anyone could ever give a 3d artist.... "Just model its silhouette and slap a texture on it"

Genius!

Anyway here are some of my wing design faux pas I made before finally settling on that elegantly simple one.

Texturing

It had already been suggested to me that there was a Mental Ray SSS (Sub-Surface Scattering) skin shader built into Maya which would be perfect for the fleshy parts of the model. A blin shader was also used to shade the head. I painted texture maps for each shader using image reference and used them for the diffuse and bump. Finally all the shaders and displacement maps were placed into a Mix20Layered shader which is available on pixero.com. the reason this layered shader was used was Maya's own layered shader for some reason doesn't like mental ray nodes.

The wing's have basic blin shaders attached to them with all the magic happening in the texture files. Inside the colour map there is also an alpha channel which is plugged into the transparency of the shader which makes the polygons of the feather transparent in places at render, meaning that you don't have to model every little detail just place transparency where you don't want the polygon to be seen. Cool huh. Well, I thought it was.

Here are some of the textures that were painted.

Rigging

Now rigging the model was not required for this project as a maya script called Rig-O-Matic was going to be used, But being the stubborn individual that I am, I wanted to know about the subject. At first I set up a simple IK rig to control the character, but that wasn't good enough for me. You see I had already been given a rigged model for another assignment and it had all the bells and whistles on it like IK/FK switches and set driven keys. So off I went again and built a better rig. This one has stretchy IK limbs and spine, IK/FK switches, and set driven keys. For the rig I relied heavily on utility nodes and the hypershade window, so much so that the graph for my rig is even more complex than my shading networks. The whole rigging process was a lot of extra work with a steep learning curve but well worth it.

IK Setup

Stretchy IK Equation Graph

Animation

The run cycle was created over 20 frames and uses the principals of a single bounce. I used IK for the legs and FK for the arms, wings and tail as I found this produced the best results. You can see the final animation at the end of this post.

Dynamics

Maya's built in fluid dynamics was used to create the flames for my creature but I was not happy with the results. Don't get me wrong, the flames looked awesome if I do say so myself, but they were getting in the way of the characters run cycle, masking certain movements, and after all the project was to design, build, texture and animate a character and not about how I could make cool flames come off the character. In the end I decided to pull them from the final animation as they took away more visually than they added.

Rendering

I used mental ray for rendering the scene and render layers to pull out different passes like the beauty, ambient occlusion and flames. Finally After Effects was used to create a scene for my character to run through helping to give an added feeling of motion instead of just running on the spot.

Conclusion

There was a massive learning curve for me on this project, not because it was required but because I wanted to learn more. One of the biggest things that I have found out from this is that if you lay good foundations in the beginning it will save you massive amounts of time in the end. For this project I must have done each phase of the process at least 3 or 4 times, if not more, just working out what processes will work best for the result I required. There were plenty of sleepless nights not because I was behind schedule but because of the vast amounts of information I was trying to compact and retain in my tiny brain. I don't know about you but I find it impossible to sleep when there is so many ideas and solutions to problems buzzing around in my head. But I have found a great solution to that, no not a lobotomy but a notepad next to your bed, trust me, once you are not worried that you will forget your thoughts by morning you will have a much better nights sleep.

So here is the final piece hope you all enjoy it.