Texturing

Let’s pass to the next step (the most important of this project). First I set up the UV’s (only planar, box or cylindrical). This is like a sketch, because after I’ll paint the textures the UV’s will be adjusted in order to give the best result. Here is a screen shot with the UV’s after finishing the texturing process. You can see that they are stretched or damaged in some places, but this won’t be seen in the final image.

The texture painting process is quite similar for all the objects, so I’ll explain it only for the back wall, the one with a window on it. So, first of all set the UV to planar, then export the wire frame. You can either take a snapshot of the view port (if it is a planar UV) or use the Texporter plug in.

p>After that, just take the file into your favorite painting software (in this case it was Photoshop) and start painting over it. I started painting by taking a nice wall texture from www.environment-textures.com and put it as the base layer.

I also reduced the opacity of the layer that contains the wire frame so I can see what I’m painting and where I’m painting.

From now on it’s all up to the artistic sense and the imagination of the painter. I wanted to make the wall a brown-yellow color, so I started by creating a new layer and fill it with the desired color tone.

Then I changed the blending mode to ‘Multiply’ and reduced the Opacity to 70%.

Step 1

First of all, open your base mesh in 3ds Max and go to the “Unwrap UVW” -> “Edit” window, and open the “Tools” menu. Click “Render UVW Template”, and set both the width and height to 2048. Click “Render UV Template”, and save the image as a .png file.

Step 2

You need rough base for your texturing, and the method I recommend is a very easy one . Just put some lights in your scene with or without GI, and give a simple skin color to the character. Render it using “Render to Texture “, by clicking the “Rendering” tab.

Step 3

Bake the texture and save it as a base for the texturing process. Select the character mesh, and click “Add” in “Output” drop down menu. Select “Complete Map”, and “Diffuse Color” for the “Target Map Slot”. Use the same width and height as you did before, in this case it’s 2048. Click “Render”…and wait for a while:)

Step 4

Save the baked textures out. Open Photoshop, and load both the UV template and baked textures.

Step 5

Drag and drop the UV template into the baked render window, and place it in the right position. Make sure it is the top layer by pressing “F7″ to open up the “Layers” window.

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

This scene was made using Lightwave for modelling and rendering, Photoshop was used for the Textures and post work.

This is a very simple scene. There are only 2 “real” Objects in the scene, the windmill and the homecoming man. The ground is a very simple subpatched object. The footpath has a few more polygons to create bumps and holes. All the bigger Plants, as well as the long grass, are planes with textures from the Total-Textures v10. The small grass was made with Sasquatch.

Modelling and Texturing of the Windmill was very easy, as well. Only simple geometric forms were put together. The stone-part of the mill is a cylinder, taper to the top. The wood-part is an 8 sided disc, extruded to the softly curved shape. The roof is made from a box, extruded into front and back.

The windows were bevelled into the wood-part. Simple boxes made the window-Frame.

The balcony was made for one of the 8 sides, by placing UV-mapped boxes. The same box was used all over. After the part was finished, it was copied and rotated around the y axis.

The small wind wheel was made by an extruded plane for the shovel, attached to a few boxes – and these were attached to metal rod. This part was rotated and cloned around the axis the wind wheel turns around. With every copy, the shovel was turned for 45 degrees. The ropes were made with a box using path-extrude. The object was subpatched afterwards.

Other objects like small bevelled discs and a few rivets are placed on the wind wheel, to add some detail.

For the big wind wheel, only one wing was made and copied when it was finished. 3 Boxes were placed on top of each other to make a stable looking main part. Smaller boxes were attached to the main part to make the wing complete. Details like the ropes were made with path-extrude

Since most parts already had UV-Maps on, Texturing of the windmill was very fast done – I was using Textures from another the Total Textures CD (v2). The stone and wood part of the windmill where Textured using cylindrical projection. I used only the colour map and the bump map from the CD, the bump map was also used for specularity.

For most of the wooded parts, I used the same Texture. A dirt map was added to make it look more irregular.

For the vegetation, simple UV-mapped planes were placed along the ground wherever seen by the camera. The Texture was taken from the Total Textures V10. Four different textures were used for the grass, five different bush-Textures were used, and one single tree-map. The colour map was used, and the transparency was controlled via the alpha maps from the CD.

I choose to light my scene from behind to get soft shadows in front of the planes. It is a good way to ensure that the planes don’t look flat. Also the shadows helped to add depth to the scene.

Sasquatch was used for the small grass. It also helped to make the planes appear like volumetric bushed.

For Rendering, DOF was used to make the foreground a little blurry. Radiosity was used for the windmills only. The two windmills were composed into the image in post work. For all renders the finished background was used.

Post work was a little complicated since I did not like the appearance of the man in the image. I painted him over, the result is much better now, but still not as good as I hoped. Also the footpath was painted over to create some stones.
After a lot of changes including colour-correction, blurring and other mixing I was finished.

Here are 3 other images one for each of the other seasons

In this tutorial I will go through my usual workflow with simple steps (trying to make it as simple as posible), to build a scene, from the preparation for the project (Pre-Pro) untill the final render, as always using Discreet 3D Studio Max, for the modelling, mapping and lighting, and Photoshop/Bodypaint for the texturing based on the great 3D total collection of textures

A good habit from the beginning is to create a special folder for the project, another subfolder for the textures and another for the references. Another advice (I always do it) is to print one of the references so you can look at it, whenever you go to bed or a bathroom break, in this print I usually write some notes and ideas to help me reach the final image

I start with the modelling extruding the floor of the building, then I make cuts on the geometry with the “slice plane” tool or also the “cut” tool, and then I extrude the in negative to make the windows, each time I finish the modelling of one of the elements I also finish the UV mapping, I don’t like to accumulate the UV mapping for the end, a couple of parragraphs below I will explain briefly my tecnic with the mapping.

In this kind of symetrical buildings is very useful to apply the “symetry” modifier, in this way we can save a lot of time and work also this guarantees the perfect location of the windows in both sides.

If the composition of the reference picture satisfyes me, i usually lay the 3D model over the picture as perfectly as possible, in this way I can fix proporion issues, with the hotkey “Alt X” I make the object transparent to make the overlaying easier.

For the antennas and cables I usually model it with renderable splines, making sure that I activated the automatic mapping, I also watch my the poly count, I know for experience that a cable of 4 spans is enough if its going to be from a medium/far distance of the camera.
The trees of the bottom of the picture were made using Onix Tree Pro, Only the visible parts are modelled, in other words they are incomplete trees

For some reason I found more simple to deform the bird neck with some bones, and a skin modifier, in this way I could move the bones in a interactive way to decide the final pose of the animal, (always using the rendering camera, so it has more strenght in the composition

The mapping is without a doubt the heaviest and most boring process when it comes to creating the scene. It is a necessary but not too creative step, also the UV maps are not something spectacular to show around saying “Hey check out my cool UV map”. But in the long run, uvmapping it’s more like a puzzle game. (it has its charm). To describe briefly my mapping process, you just have a few simple rules:

1 – You should not have overaying UVS EVER
2 – The checker map we put on the object has to represent perfect even squares
3 – The objects in the UVeditor should have the same proportion as the ones in the scene
4 – Make sure the orientation of the object is correct in the UVmap editor
5 – It is convenient to optimize the space inside the map

A good way to begin the mapping, is using planar maps to unfold the object and then stitch the individual pieces together, also you could equally stitch the pieces from an automatic mapping, I assigned the hotkey”S” for “stitch” in that way I can select an edge, and hit “S” and I can stitch pieces really fast. Always remember that if you put a lot of efford into the Uvmapping it will be less likely to have problems ahead once we painted the textures in Photoshop