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.

Introduction

This will be a brief explanation about making of the quad bike, I like quads but you won’t exactly see me riding one (too scary for me ) anyway it was needed for a small project for a presentation of a quad and motorcycles racing track, it needed to be animated as well.

Reference

As usually if you needed any decent realistic existing model you need reference, unfortunately I couldn’t find blueprints for the quad but I did manage to find a decent front side pictures, a tip is to not only look in the official sites and try google image search or anything similar, amateur images is sometimes more clear than good ones because they don’t do any effort to make it perfect they show it for how its really is

As you see its far from perfect reference, so when modeling you always have to be careful and look at reference images taken from a normal viewing angle and checking to see if it’s the same or not (simply use your eye), you can pretty much say that modeling without decent blueprints isn’t certainly your first choice, I can hear some one out there saying duh anyway.
A little trick also is to put the reference image as a background then use a camera to try to replicate the original one, and see if there are major proportional differences (camera match)

Modeling

I’ve had no problems with modeling, the only hard thing was the lack of good reference which makes modeling more time consuming, I made the all the basic objects using editable poly as following:

then I started adding details also using primitives, splines etc.. and adding simple modifiers to primitives taper, FFD etc
I did also make 4 or 5 types of screws and small objects so I can quickly start copying them and instancing them, that added good amount of details very quickly

Introduction:

This 3 part video tutorial by ten24’s James Busby will show the process of preparing and using photographic reference to create realistic human characters. Part 1 will show the steps taken in Photoshop with parts 2 and 3 focusing on the methods used in Lightwave. Also available for download with this tutorial is the base mesh used.

Chapter 1: Photoshop

Please wait while this movie loads

Duration: 09 minutes 12 seconds

Click Here to Download the Character Head Base Mesh | Size: 64kb

INTRODUCTION

This project was made to learn blueprint modeling and unwraping (I had never done this before). In this making of I’m going to show all parts of my work and also I’m going to point on mistakes that I have made. I hope that my making of will be useful for those who wants to start with this as well and will help them to avoid of making the same mistakes.

I used this software and plugins:
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*VIZ2008 – scene
*Brazil r/s V2 pro beta – rendering
*Texporter – VIZ doesn’t have feature to save unwraped wire image (I didn’t find it:) so this plugin was handy.
*Photoshop – texture painting and postproduction

Some info about the jet which I created:
—————————————
This aircraft is being developed for Indian army as LCA (Light combat aircraft) since 1983. Its main goal is to replace old MIG 21. In present is done prototype PV-3.
In some details is similar with Mirage 2000. Aircraft is very small and it belongs among the smallest and the lightest in the world.

SCENE SETUP

At first I had to find some good blueprint reference. There was a little problem with this aircraft as it isn’t very famous. I found only one version of blueprint on google, unfortunately not much detailed.

Here is an example of which I consider as a great reference if you want to make a quality aircraft model with all details

I loaded blueprints into photoshop and with rulers checked if the dimensions of top, side and front views coresponds. I dont’t have screenshot of this from HAL Tejas project but on image below there is example from another project which I’m making.

I inverted colours on whole image (there is also good to add some contrast). I like to have black background and white lines which helps me later with the opacity trick in scene. Then I cut each view into separate images: top, side and front with ~ coresponding image rosolutions and saved them. I created box in VIZ with matching proportions to the reference images, converted it into editable mesh and deleted 3 sides. I assigned its own Material ID (1,2,3) to each of resting sides. Then I applied multi/Sub-object material on this box. Sub-Material settings are showed on the image below (self ilumination set to full white, speculars off and previously prepared reference images in the opacity slot). This makes visible only the lines of drawed aircraft and they are independend on the scene lighting.


*/TIP: there is also a lot of tools and scripts for crating bluprint planes in the viewport e.g. imagePlaneMaker.ms — By Neil Blevins/*

Intro
I originally made this environment for a Ghost Recon 3 (Advanced Warfighter) trailer in 2005. It’s an imaginary street supposed to be in a poor suburban area of a Mexico City ravaged by war. I was so excited about the project that I continued it at home, adding more details and atmosphere. So it’s quite an old project, and some techniques and software used here are a bit outdated, but as you know, it’s artistic feeling and inspiration that matters the most

Software used :
• Max 7
• Scanline (with “light tracer”)
• Dreamscape (sky)
• Photoshop
• After Effects

Reference
I spent a long time looking for reference, as I always do, but in this particular case, while analysing the specific Mexico architecture, it was very interesting to “discover” a country I know almost nothing about.

Modeling
The buildings were very simple to model, they are basically boxes with holes for windows, and little or no ornaments.

I made some buildings from the reference pictures I had, also from the many derelict old shops of my neighborhood.

Then I added details like cracks, damaged walls, for which I used mostly standard booleans (“subtraction” mode). It can be painful since Max’s booleans are very unstable (at least it was when I did the project, it’s getting better), but it’s worth the effort because it takes little memory and is very fast to do despite being buggy.

Then I made lots of set dressing objects (mostly secondary, background ones) like lamp posts, fences, planks, posters… I was helped in that task by fellow 3D artist Olivier Fleurette while working on the trailer at MAgiclab. I also reused a couple of objects from older projects and some free meshes too.
Texturing
The longest part of the process. For the main buildings I made customized maps in Photoshop (one unique map per building), then some more generic ones for the background buildings, with some black and white masks and a bit of vertex color for dirt (used as a mask in the materials)

Lighting/Rendering/Compositing
The scene is lit only by sunlight, which is a standard directional light with area shadows, and a Skylight. It was rendrered in Scanline using Light Tracer. It’s not a physically correct radiosity engine so the results are not very accurate. It’s quite fast when using only Skylight, but if you want light bounces, anything takes forever to render (That’s when “light bleed” becomes useful). That was the last time I used it, and I’ll never come back ! But anyway, it was a practical choice in a time when default Scanline was already outdated, Mental Ray was crappy (compatibility issues with lots of plugins) and new renderers like Vray were not very wide-spread in studios. After rendering a good near-final version of the whole scene in 4k (including the sky and fog rendered with Dreamscape), I kept adding details by merging small region renders into the main image in Photoshop, while I started to do some paint-overs to correct a couple things I didn’t like but were too long to do in 3D. Then I contrasted, color corrected and added a slight glow in After Effects. That’s it, because fx-wise I’m an activist of the “less is more” movement (MOVE THE MOUSE OVER THE PICTURE BELOW TO SEE THE RENDERING SETTINGS)

Stages of progress

Olivier Vernay-Kim (bakho)
http://oli.vernay.free.fr/