my dark creature

For the last 2 weeks I have been busy with my dark creature.
This creature will haunt Timmy in the short movie and I had a good idea of what it would look but never sat down and actually make it. So eventually I did and it worked out great for once, the inspiration I had was from an old magic the gathering card, it is called diabolic vision.

I bought the cards when I was 17 so 20 years ago just for the artwork and I am glad I did.
My drawings where ..ok but it really got me working in a way I like best and that is with atmosphere.
I love to work from my gut so to speak, things have to feel good. Also I love some inspiring music in the background to feed the mood.

Back to my "villain", it comes in 2 forms, one ordinary human character and a monstrous version. I fairly quickly modeled a head that matched my feel of the character and after that I had to make the monster version as wel. I have a hint that makes the connection between the 2 apparent.
I want to show the creature but that will majorly spoil some things and I don't know if I want to do that...

Also it took me quit some work to get the creature the way I wanted to. Since I had a base mesh I wanted to sculpt the detail into it in c4d, but how wrong I was, the baking in c4d sucks big time so I tried 3d coat. Since I had no experience with the software I decided to give it a go and I really liked it until the moment I had to bake the map out...it took me 3 days and no result without artifacts so that sucked big time.
People where very nice on the forum and it is probably my inexperience with the software.
So I tried it in zbrush and after some tweaking in the settings it gave me the desired result.

Creating the rig was no problem with the c4d's character rig but I had some issues with the weighting and that is just my inexperience as well I guess.
After some trial and error hours I got it where I needed it to be.
Also I bought Valkaari's delta mush, check it out here!
http://www.valkaari.com/?product=delta-mush
I can't wait to use it on my next character, this can be a huge timesaver.

So thats that for now.

Next up is the villain in it's human form.

octane testing

Hey Y'all,

Since I have finished a project as of yesterday I have time to finaly some time for octane.
It is a renderer working via the gpu so all my 40 threads are sittin here doing nothin.
But the reason I bought octane is to be red in the previous blogpost.

So I have experimented a bit and I must say I like it a lot.
It has some flaws but I the almost instant feedback gives me the creative freedom I was looking for.
Also I found out some small but nice things that you bump into when working with the renderer.
Such as using the focus target, you have to switch off automatic focus, small things but nice.
I experimented a bit with the render settings to make it faster and it is fairly straight forward, nothing to hard to find out, love it!
I love it solely becuz I have to do less and make, make nice things.
So what next, I had to tweak some things in the posemorph, I had 2 xpresso tags to drive those and one to point the eyes into a target gizmo.
I used a correction deformer to close the eyelids over the eyeball accordingly and it was driven by a posemorph and that posermorph was driven by a slider in the eyegizmo, so it had a bit lag, I took the xpresso and combined them into one tag and the lag went away, nice!

So from now on I will hopefully keep this thing going on a regular base.

Some renders from octane.
Also I used a sss skin from the octane library and hooked my face texture in it and tweaked some settings to get this nice skin.

This last thing was my first test with the renderer, just to see how it worked.
I also love the dirt shader, edges can be made scratchy within no time!

Cheers!!!

kickin it

Sooo, that's a long time ago since I posted something here.
There where some jobs that took my time and some personal issues.
Went on vacation to Thailand with my girlfriend and finishing up on another short and did some work for a new freelance collective I am part of.
So all those things are almost finished up and I can't wait to dive back into the WKTB world.

That being said doesn't mean I did not do anything...
There are some things that happened since then for example I was not happy with the deformations happening in the face of Timmy when animating so I downloaded some sort of a correct edge flowed head and sculpted it back to a new version of Timmy.
It made a huge difference and I added some more forehead so that I have more room for the eyebrows and give him more character and facial expression.
That worked out great and I used posemorphs for it all, I no longer use the interaction tag for the animation, it sounds great and I really thought that it was the holy grail but for this type of animation I was not getting the fast results that ordinary posemorphs gave me.
Also I made the eyelids move when the eyes are pointing to left or right, it makes it more fleshy and it adds some realism to it.

This is the new face of this little bad boy and I only lit it really fast and it is just the basic texturing.

Talking about rendering.
Since I hate the fact that Vray is slow as hell with development I bought octane render engine.
I thought why not give it a try and let's see how far that will bring me to good or great results.
Vray never was fast in the way I needed it to be.
I have a 20 core machine and I really need the instant feedback to get shit done and vray is promising us all vray RT for about 3 years now and I see some progress on that but 3 years since the first RT preview came to my light and I decided to give it a go.
I feel fucked over and therefore I will try octane for now to see if that engine gives me a better workflow.
And the first thing everyone knows when working with it is that the feedback is of the hook, love it and I can't wait to use it on the project.

So thats it for now, I am still kickin it and feel good.

Cheers

It's been a while

Sooo, it has been a while.
There where some things that kept me off track so there you go.
I've got some personal things that affected my eagerness to move forward, also technical things and last and certain not the least work.
I've done a lot of work on the side of my regular job lately.
I did a fun commercial for kidsweek.
https://vimeo.com/120345792

And I am also doing a strawberry plant for an upcoming short film.
I've had some difficulties with that as well but now I am on track for now.
This is the link to the short:
http://aardbeienmysterie.com/

It is a lot of work but now I have some time to get into my own stuff again.
I've been struggling with the face of my character for a bit and must do something about it but I don't know what to do exactly so what I wanted to do for now is focus on the shots that need animation but are not that close to the camera.
I want to move forward so I can get a sense of animating and get shit done so to speak.
I am tired of the stale mate position I find myself in far to many times.

So there you go, a little update.
If I can I will post something asap but that is not for certain since life is kinda hectic right now.

Peace!

Nick

the room_03

The last couple of days I was really getting into the animation and final tweaking of the room scene.
And since of today I am happy with how it looks.
The still posted here is from the animation so it all looks like this.

I am pretty happy with that.
I exported enough vray matte ID passes with it so I could tweak the coloring of Timmy in nuke.
Also I used a different render technique for the background than for the character, vray has some different methods for those and the bruteforce one for the character worked great without to much hassle, so I was glad for that.

It was a fun task to come up with a nice grade.
This looks cool but it will not mean this is the final grade of the movie.
That will evolve over time fcuz but for now I am happy to get something worth while.
I am really looking forward to spend some time with the project and since it is almost x-mas time I can and therefore will.
I want to finish the in house scenes and play with'm to get a feeling for the animation.
Since this is my first real animation I am eager to dive in and I love to work on the detail which you have to put in the animation it to get it to come across as believable as possible.

So more to follow soon.
Have a great x-mass!

Nick

the room_02

I have animated my first scene incl Timmy and I am rendering it right now.
I am rendering the background separate from the foreground.
Just finding a workflow to get those scenes rendered correctly and fast.

This is a still from the first animation scene.

I am comping this in Nuke, I love the channel workflow but since fusion is free to use I will switch to that compositor.
It will take some time to get that workflow down but it is a cool piece of software for serious comping and I have used it back at filmschool so good to see it becoming available for free or the pro version for a good price.

There is a lot to be done so I will occasionally put some imagery on this blog.

Bye.

the room_01

I couldn't contain myself and revamped the room:D