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.

Software Used :

ZBrush, Maya

Introduction :

I am a big fan of military topics. Since I had already done a soldier, this time I wanted to try a World War II German general.

Refrence :

Because this character was based on the real world look-and-feel, I didn’t draw any concepts for it. Therefore, I needed a ton of references instead. I found an old man reference from 3d.sk which I decided to use for my character; the reason was simply that it was a perfect reference to practice my ZBrush sculpting skills with and would also fit my character pretty well (Fig.01).

Fig.01

Modeling :

I created a plane in ZBrush with the reference image as the texture. Then, I started to model the head from a sphere. It’s much easier to get the right proportion if you have an image plane (Fig.02).

Fig.02

After I’d roughly done the sculpting, I exported a high-poly OBJ file to Maya and started to do re-topology. This is a very important step if you want your model to be used for real production. Modeling is only the first step of the production process; there is a lot of work after that, such as unwrapping, rigging, animation, etc. If you can keep your wireframe clean and appropriate, it will make everyone’s life much easier. I used a Maya plugin called “Nex”, which is a very nice tool to do re-topology with; using this plugin will keep your polygons in quads and evenly-spaced easily (Fig.03).

Fig.03

After completing the re-topology process, I exported another OBJ file and went back to ZBrush. With clean edge-loops, this time I was finally able to work on the details. There’s one thing I’d like to point out at this point: each area of the face has a particular skin texture. It’s important not to use the same texture everywhere because it will look unrealistic (Fig .04).

Fig.04

The target of this project was to create a rigged character as real as possible and with all the clothes layers. This has been the first time I do something like this, and also the first time I tried to do a full human character, so I also used it to learn a lot.

Modeling

There’s really not too much to explain about the modeling. It’s all always the same tools: extruding edges and polys, cutting edges, moving vertexes… These are the basics that everybody can learn from the famous Joan of Arc tutorial. Once you have that basics, I think what is more useful to learn is to see the wires, so here you have mine. You can see some parts have more edges than the normal, but that’s cause all the rigging stuff I wanted to add. For example, if you look at the hips, I added some edges just to make the flesh deform correctly when she’s wearing the underwear, or if you look at the ribs I added edges to create them but in the modeling pose they are not visible, I just make them visible when she’s bending back. That’s, imo, probably the hardest part about modeling, knowing where you have to put the edgeloops and knowing what you will need when rigging. It’s just planning it before start to model.

During the wip of this project, some people asked me how I model the clothes. Once you have the body it’s easier. For example, to create her shirt I first duplicated the body mesh and added a bit of push. Then I deleted all the parts I don’t needed (legs, hands, head…) and tried to reduce the quantity of edges, trying to preserve the body’s shape. It’s just deleting edgeloops till you have it as simple as you can. Then I add the cloth parts, so for example, with the shirt, I added the seams on the lower part, where the body and the arms come together and all the neck zone, creating the shape and adding the rope. But still all as simple as you can, the less polys the better it will be. So I had something like in the image. Finally I added all the wrinkles. For me it’s useful to have references even of an irregular think as the wrinkles, not to exactly copy them, but to have an idea of where will them appear and how. Creating them it’s easy but boring for me. It’s just selecting some edges you have (or creating new edges cutting them) and extruding them (with a 0 height) so you finish with a triple parallel edgeloop, and then you just have to move up or down the middle edges to create the wrinkle, move the vertexes to make it more irregular and weld target the vertexes on the ends of the wrinkle. And repeat this process with different shapes and directions till you’re happy with the result.

Rigging

In this project I did my own rigging instead of using character studio, cause this way I had more control about it, and it had been better for me to learn, that was really the purpose of this project. I learned a lot from this two guys, www.keesrijnen.com and www.paulneale.com, so I think I have to mention them.Really there’s not too much I can say in a tutorial like this. I’ve done IK legs, a spline IK for the spine and IK-FK arms (the way to do this is to create 3 arms for each, one working in IK, other working in FK and the third one, that is the real arm, takes the position from one or from the other depending on a value of a spinner I have). For the facial rigging I also used bones and some morphers, but I didn’t liked the result so the next time I will do it a bit different (with bones and morphers too, but in a different way).

I think the strangest think I’ve done in this rigging are the breast bones. I was trying to simulate the real breast movement, so when she’s looking down they tend to center and fall, when she’s looking up they tend to separate and flatten and when she moves an arm up they have to stretch too. I used a combination of morphers and this bones, that where rotated inside or outside depending on the body’s position.

Skinning