This box car is based on a train model hand painted by Ron Thornton. This project took about a week and a half. I used reference pictures of the model box car and measurements to create it to scale. The making of the box car is broken down into modeling, texturing, lighting, and compositing.

Modelling

Modeling from the trucks all the way down to each rivet, details were crucial to make this look photorealistic. I teamed up with Alex Lee for the modeling on the box car. We used some blueprint references from the train set and many high resolution reference images of the box car on the track. The great thing about the box car is that we could measure a model of a train a lot easier than a real train. The modeling took about 4 days. More measurements the better, just make sure you keep organized or it can get confusing.

Texturing

The texturing was fun. For reference I used images of real trains and lot of rust pictures. I used mostly image maps for my textures. I did add some procedurals over the images to break up repeating patterns of the rust. I found another great technique to get the rust images I was looking for. I used the blend if option in the blending options of each layer of Photoshop. With this I was able to control the blending of two images very effectively. You can blend the background into the foreground and vise versa; also you can extend the control by using the blending modes supplied by Photoshop like multiply, hard light, etc. If you would like to know more about this method please feel free to e-mail me.

Lighting

When using a picture to composite into like these images you need to match the lighting almost exactly to hide the cg element in the scene. The main things I look for in the photo are the direction of the shadows, softness of the shadows, the light intensity, and the color of light. In the compositions I used two or three area lights to get the same effect as using radiosity, which helped with render times. I set up a warm light for the main light, and then I used cool lights for fill in.

Last week I decided to upgrade to the new Adobe apps, as usual I did my backups and of course I forgot very important things, such as my Photoshop Brushes and Patterns. I hate when that happens, but it does happen all the time. So I had to look for my brushes and I found some really cool new ones and decided to play a bit with them and with the new Adobe Photoshop.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a smoke typography effect playing with some brushes and adjustment layers. It’s a very easy tutorial and you will be able to do the whole process in 5-10 minutes.

Step 1

Open Photoshop and create a new document, I used 1920×1200 pixels. Then apply a gradient, you could fill it with a gradient or apply a Layer Style. I used the layer style, Gradient Overlay. Use Radial for the Style and #07090a – #202b35 for the colors.

Step 2

Add some text in white then go to Filter>Blur>Motion Blur. Use 90º for the Angle, and 40 pixels for the Distance.

Step 3

Now go to Filter>Distort>Wave. use 3 for the Number of Generators, 10 and 346 for the Wavelength, and 5 and 35 for the Amplitude.

Step 4

Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Use 10 pixels for the Radius. Then group the layer and rename the folder’s Blend Mode to Color Dodge. You will get a nice light effect.

The following describes how I setup the UV’s for my model in order to paint the textures.

Step 1: make a duplicate of your model. This is important so you don’t mess up any of your original model. Later you can transfer the UV’s from this duplicate back onto your original.

Step 2: On the duplicate, select the areas that are the most complex (ie. nose, ears, eye area, lips). (you probably will want to do this step one area at a time).

Step 3: now you’ll want to average your selected vertices. You can get to this command through the Polygons>Average Vertices>options menu.

Set the Iteration value to whichever you feel is appropriate. I set mine between 10 and 50 and applied it a couple times. Repeat this step for all of your complex areas on your model. The reason for averaging the vertices is to make the more complex areas of your model less complex, so after you apply the Cylindrical projection, you won’t get so many (if any) overlayed UV’s, which will cause problems for your mapping.

When you’re finished with that, your duplicate should look something like the images on the right. As you can see, all the more complex areas of my model are now less complex and more planar, which should make a better cylindrical projection and UV layout.

Step 4: Now you’re ready to map the UV’s for your model. Select your duplicate model and go to the Edit Polygons>Textures>Cylindrical Mapping>options menu. I just used the Smart Fit option which fits the projection automatically around your selection. You’re welcome to play around with the different options, but for this instance, these are the settings I used.

Step 5: In the attribute editor for the cylindrical projection, you’ll find the following options (right image). Make sure you set the Rotate Z value to 0.1. Maya has this weird habit of messing up the UV’s of the cylindrical projection, and this seems to fix the problem. These are the settings I used.

Step 6: I also noticed that the UV’s for the top of the head and the UV’s for the neck area were garbled
from the Cylindrical projection, so I selected the poly’s on the top of the head, and did a planar projection for those, and selected the poly’s around the neck and did a second Cylindrical projection for those.

So I ended up with 3 UV shells in the UV Texture Editor, which I’ll need to sew together to get one unwrapped UV shell

Hello, this is Taehoon oh, I’m a senior artist working for one of the best game developing companies in California, US, and this is my private work, Rhino and Terminators.

I’m a big fan of the Warhammer 40k series, but I’m more interested in the concept and painting, I’m not that good at tactical stuff.

I spent more than six months on this project. I mostly used Maya for the modelling and rendered with Mental ray. So now I would like to share with you all about how it was created. I’ ll explain with 3 different parts, making the model, textures and composing the scene.

Concept & Reference

I found most of my reference from magazines and the Internet. I discovered that there are many different styles and colors of Rhino tank, but I chose the Ultramarine blue color and the simplest shape for modeling. For the character I chose the Terminators like you can see below. The main reason why is that I thought this character is the coolest from Warhammer 40k series. However, it wasn’t easy to define the head shape in 3D.

Reference for the Rhino’s

Reference for the Rhino’s

Modelling

I started polygon modelling from the side tracing and extruding. I used Boolean tool often, even though I don’t trust the Maya one but it worked fine.

The Armor

The armor was the most exciting part to model. I created simple shapes, like cylinders, tubes, boxes and even hexagons as a modelling tool. Even these simple default poly models have UV maps too. So I could change the scale and placed them wherever I wanted.

Characters

I have mostly used Maya’s smooth proxy modelling tool. I learned to use this CPS tool a long time ago and now I just love to use it. This time, the smooth proxy modelling tool was really helpful for making nice curved shapes for the armor and the skull.

The Terminator’s Head

The head of terminator was a really fun part for me. I didn’t use many polygons when making it so it’s very economical. The head is a little different from the original one, I like the more stylized and cartoon looking one, so I made the shape more round and cute.

I started this piece with something as simple as a Z-sphere (Fig.01a). Playing with the Symmetry tool, an idea was born (Fig.01b)! Z-spheres are simply awesome! They allowed me to build the body of my concept in the fastest way – ever (Fig.01c) – and with a clean mesh, too (Fig.01d)! The UVs were done in 3ds Max, and I added the left arm and the hat before starting to sculpt the details (Fig.01e).

Fig. 01a

Fig. 01b

Fig. 01c

Fig. 01d

Fig. 01e

Once I’d imported my Subtools (Fig.02a), I got sculpting (Fig.02b)! I still didn’t know at this stage how the final picture was going to look … but ZBrush allowed me to change anything at any time – very quickly (Fig.02c)! So I started looking for a cool facial expression; I knew this was going to be the most important thing to have in a fun image (Fig.02d – e)!

Fig. 02a

Fig. 02b

Fig. 02c

Fig. 02d

Fig.02e

I did the texturing using the poly painting technique in ZBrush – it’s a great tool for achieving something quickly (Fig.03)! I could then make tweaks later on in Photoshop, using the normal map, displacement and cavity to get something more accurate, and to add extra details. I usually paint with the “Toy plastic” shader – it keeps the colours true, and I got good specularity and bump. You can paint fast with the colour spray mode and some alphas; i love beginning the texture work in ZBrush because you don’t have seams to worry about and you see the result directly on the hi-res mesh!

Fig. 03

The purpose of tking of is to outline the tools and techniques I used in the creation of my image, Hornedman. The image started as a sketch inside ZBrush and grew from there into the final image almost by accident.

Sketching characters in ZBrush is a great way to concept ideas, mess around with forms and come up with cool new things. After the sketch I retopologised the head section of the model and from there used the polypaint tools in ZBrush to create the textures. Rendering was handled with Mental Ray in 3ds Max. I find Mental Ray to be the most accessible of the available rendering systems for Max, and the fact that Max already comes with it makes it great. Also, having used XSI for many years, the creation of shaders in Mental Ray has become second nature to me.

Sketching

The starting point of many of my images, characters and dailies are done in ZBrush in the form of a sketch. As my drawing skills aren’t really worth writing home about, I find ZBrush to be a real lifesaver in terms of creating concepts. And the great thing is that you can visualise your concepts in 3D and even use the concept as a template to model over later on in the pipeline.
For this character I started with a basic human form mesh that I created in XSI some years ago and have been using in many projects since (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Using this mesh at the lowest sub-division I pushed and pulled it around with the Move tool and Standard brush in ZBrush to find a base form and silhouette I liked. From there I worked my way up the subdivision levels adding progressively more detail using the Clay Tubes and Clay brushes only. An overview of the different sub-division levels can be seen in Fig.02 – 03.

Fig. 02

Fig. 03

Retopologising

For this model I decided to just retopologise the head as the loops on the body were adequate for my needs. The retopologising process was simple; I exported a mid-res .obj from ZBrush into 3ds Max and then used Polyboost’s surface snapping tools to create a clean mesh over the old one. For the body I just exported the lowest subdivision out of ZBrush and joined that onto my new head. I then exported this new low-res .obj back into ZBrush, assigned it as a SubTool of the original sketch, subdivided it up to 4 million polys, and chose Project All to project my sculpted sketch onto my clean topology (Fig.04).

Fig. 04

As this was still indented to be a full character I also modelled some base gear and straps for him in 3ds Max

Texturing

For the texturing stage I decided to use the polypaint feature in ZBrush. As the model still didn’t have a set of UVs this was perfect for me to sketch on a try out some ideas for the skin. I used a technique outlined by Scott Spencer with his Stinger Head model to paint the texture. Firstly I chose a base colour for his skin, and then painted on sprays of red, blue and green in key places. Then I “noodled” the skin with white veins and finally sprayed over it all with my base colour at a low opacity. This is a very fast and effective technique for concepting skin tones and painting textures. As I still wasn’t sure what to do with him at this stage, I left the texture rough (Fig.05 – 06).

Fig. 05