Athena WIP

Hi!

10000+ hits, not bad eh? Not really if your consider that the site has been around for about 15 months which means on average around 20+ hits a day…so. But then again i have created something out of nothing. (Still people get 10,000+ hits a day). I feel like im on a seesaw praising myself then breaking it down .

anyway

The last time i posted stuff on anatomy was back in January 2008, which is ridiculous since the site was originally setup to be mainly about modeling.

So here is a project that i started ages ago and never really came back to it. So a week ago i carried on from where i left off.

Not much explanation required. Just alot of observation and study of anatomy. Hands need alot of work along with the feet and face. In fact EVERYTHING needs work…so. Until the next post here is where i am.

responses:

S9: Hey there mate. Totally agree with you. Sculpting allows one to focus more on the shape and form before then converting it into a technically sound model.

Mike: cheers mate.

Patrick: Hey there patrick. Yeah im not doing to bad in Houdini. Its a great package and one with almost infinite depth. Its gonna be useful in the future since i am finishing the first draft of a short film i want to make soon. So check back to see some progress on that. I will post this WIP on NaP too see what you guys think.

Next post

dunno? see ya then.

-andrew

Anatomy study 01 – The back

Hey guys, when i created this blog i had tried to make it all about my 3d progression as possible. And while there have been a few instances where i have deviated from this path, some to test out features of wordpress, others just because i took my eye off the ball. AKA plugs (which i still feel are kind of warranted since the number of places for modellers/techies can never be enough).

But every once and awhile a piece of news will float around the internet and shock the world, to the point where i cannot turn away.

Tara Reid has cellulite!!!!!!

(im not sure if its actually cellulite rather than she has had too much liposuction so there is no more fat on here stomach, but it makes for amazing reference for old people with lopsided breast implants, poor girl)

Oh yeah and Autodesk has now bought Softimage.

WTF!!

Can lighting strike twice in the same place twice. Well of course it can. And it has (well not at the same place but at another big company). The guided bolt came down from the gates of Autodesk and struck its competitor between the eyes. I imagine it has been hard to keep this from spilling onto the forums and i must say they have done a pretty good job of it. (And i have recently heard that Softimage staff found out pretty much the same time we did, so we can see why it was so easy to contain).

A lot of people are saying it was expected that Softimage was gonna get bought, but from Autodesk was another thing.

Im not gonna harp on about this since I dont really want to say something stupid…… too late.

One thing i found awesome though, was i said over on odForce “I just want Kim Davidson to say ‘This will never happen to SideFX’ ” , which is a pretty naive and selfish comment, since i understand that sometimes its necessary to sell in order to keep the product and the staff alive.

But 7 hours later after a good nights sleep i woke up to find i had a message from none other than the president of SideFX software. I wont say exactly what he said, but suffice it to say he reassured me of SideFX and Houdini’s future (at least for the time being). I know you can never say never, but along with the fact that SESI is a privately held company, Kim’s passion for Houdini and the craft of CG, i think SESI is pretty safe.

The main thing people really worry about with acquisitions is, possible price increase, lack of innovation, job security (if you work for the target) and possible discontinuation of the product. And although Kim never said it in so many words, i felt the message he was putting out was SESI are in control of their products, their creative path and want to serve their customers to the best of their abilities.

back to business

So anyone notice the title of this blog post. This thing is meant to be about anatomy. I just thought i would take the opportunity to inform people of current affairs (yeah like you dont already know, but it will be cool to look back on this in the future)

Regular readers will probably know i have dabbled a little in anatomy over the year. Little attempts that i spend way to much time on and eventually looks horrible/wrong. Well the main reason it looks so bad is my knowledge on anatomy.

So last week i ordered a book, recommended by Scott Eaton (recent addition to the Artists/Modellers links). “Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist”. If there is anyone looking to further their knowledge for artistic purposes GET THIS BOOK. Its a cheap, informative and exhaustive look into anatomy for the artist. (ok thats the plug of the post). Get it now.

In the interim i decided to try learn as much as i could. One area where my skills have always failed me is when i model the back. I just never turns out right.

So i took a few anatomical images and decided to do an ecorche study (which i have never done before). (above right)

Also I wanted to sculpt the image on the left to completion but i knew i didnt have the knowledge or the reference to do it justice, so it will sit quitely on my hard drive untill i feel im upto it.

But eventualy the book. Ive spent the last two days just crawling over the images and text with no discernible order but this morning i decide to put this thing to use.

I did my first sculpture of a back in a very very long time.

It took a little over an hour from a base mesh.

I almost exclusively used the clay tubes brush, and built up the forms and boney structures and i must say it was a joy to watch my model come to life. Its not perfect, in fact i can already see areas that need a lot more work but i think its some of the best work ive done since its rooted in actual anatomy.

I dont expect to create models with the same quality i usually do using this technique and knowledge.

It will take a little time and patience, but already i have cranked something out in an hour of what might take me well over 3, and thats because i knew what i was looking for and not just trying to replicate an image pixel for pixel. So it’s a lot of practice really, its probably the biggest factor that will make you / me faster.

Andrew Loomis: Figure Drawing for all its worth

Along with these images the first thing i did when i decided to get back into anatomy was to look at the resources i already had. A few years ago i remember a few of Andrew Loomis’s books. One in particular that sparked my interest was “Figure Drawing for all its worth”. Alot of useful stuff and is a very good read. Its pretty hard for me to read book on the computer, dont know why but the books were out of print at the time. but i have heard his family are to re-release them (so i will stay tuned for that).

One of the early exercises in the book is on proportion. Many tips in the this section but here is my first attempt of the idyllic man.

I wish i could talk more about this but this post is already getting a bit long in the tooth.

I cant wait to see where this book takes me, im having a lot of fun and learning stuff along the way.

So over the next 50 years you will probably see some more images of my learning process. (since i hear it takes a long time to learn this stuff). I still havent come to that crossroads when modelling figures, should i model that penis or vagina?

Hope to post more frequently in the next few months considering it didnt take that long to make these images and i know thats what a lot of you guys like to see.

And yes, the bee project is still alive. It needs some adjustments but i will be furring it up .

Take care, bee safe.

-andrew

Bee Project: Part Two – Modelling

Hello there,

So here comes the obligatory apology. Sorry. I’ve been away for a while over the summer.

But you guys better be grateful for this post. Ive spent allot of time gathering up the media that went into this post so i hope you enjoy it all.

In part one I started by talking about how people got to this site, so with this post i have to say the thing on this blog that gets the most hits has to be the Fur network setup pic.

Since then, Houdini has matured into version 9.5, so the next part of this series will no doubt have some different methodologies. I have played a tiny bit with fur in the current version and it is different. More on that next post

Final mode

Lets begin with some stats then. It was modeled entirely in Wings3d. It currently weighs in at around 20k polys, there arent any UV’s. This might be covered in the next post (im not sure because UV’s are a pretty boring process, i dont know if anyone cares to read about it).

Im gald i got to finish this thing but there is a lot of research behind it so sit back and enjoy.

Notes & Research

Before i started i knew this was going to be difficult just for the fact that its hard to see whats going on under all that fur. So i gather a few diagrams and basic reference images and drew what i felt was a good shape for the body, wings, mouth etc.

I didnt do this so i could provide myself with image planes or something definitive to work from. This was basically to understand as much as i could and also point out ideas and issues long in advance.

These drawings/sketches was a good push off point to know what references i needed more of and other research that would be useful later in the project.

ie biological Iridescence for the wings.

If you are going to do this, always remember these images are for you and not for anyone else. These dont have to be perfect or presented in a nice way. It is just an outlet for getting your ideas and thoughts down on paper.

Here my pages from this project.

Reference

So from the notes and sketches i created i knew what i needed. One thing the interest provides is a wealth of choices. I probably have 200 images of bee’s in my reference folders and came across 1000 images in total via google image search. The main difficulty is continuity. There are so many types of bee’s in the world, so when you enter “honey bee”, you will come across 50 variations. Even if they are the same species, there is a lot of differences.

So the approach i decided to take was to gather groups of photos. If i found an image of a bee, i would try to find out if they are part of a collection.

The best place is to find these types of collections is on forums. There are forums for just about anything and the best place i found were photography and specialist bee forums. But When looking for stuff on forums via google always put “showthread” with whatever you need to find in the search box. This will always point to a thread on a forum and if its a good lead, then you can browse that site.

Then when I had found as many collections as I could take then I would gather specific body parts. Body, Abdomen, mouth, wings, eyes.

Here is a sample of the references I used.

This was in fact was the easy part. But the overall shape of the bee was still a bit of enigma since its covered by so much “fur”. But i have found that the hardest object/people to model isn’t because they are hard surfaces to mimic, its just you don’t have enough reference. And when i did gather the reference for this project i made sure everything was organized so i knew where to get certain images from.

One thing that threw me off was what type of bee am i creating. Was it a drone, a worker or the queen?

See if you can notice the differences between them (especially between the drone and worker).

makin’ of

Before I talk about the method of modelling this new found monster, i have to say get into the habit of making incremental saves. This project alone. Which was modelled in entirely in wings, has just under 100 saves. Not only is it easier to find the most current file, especially when using other applications but also if the original file becomes corrupted, you always have a place to fall back on.

It would be very awkward for me to describe how i model the actual bee, without getting very lengthly. So i have provided a video of the various files with a look at the final model.

Enjoy!

Vimeo Link for Google Reader Users

Vimeo, is crap, i know. I am trying to make it host it on veoh like the Angry Boy video, but their servers are slow or something. But you can download the file now (when you host with Vimeo).

What’s Next

The next part of this saga will probably be the last part for a while.

It will be the creation and experimentation process of applying fur to the model. I will explain it in as much detail as possible. The good parts, the bad parts.

And basic rendering, because in part 3 will cover the rendering and shader process. I have not yet decided to write the shaders in VEX or make it in VOP’s.

I will try to make some sort of iridescence shader for the wings, a procedural shader for the body and a geometry/displacement shader for the compound eye.

In part 4, i will again try to cover the rigging process of the honey bee. I chose this project for a particular reason, it incorporates many areas of CG whilst remaining relatively simple. The rigging process should be pretty simple but i have an idea for multiple rigs.

In part 5 I will animate it in a scene. The scene will contain a two characters, a Bee and a person and an enviroment. This will take quite a while.

So by this time next year part 5 should be coming out.

… hopefully hehe

by now you should be satisfied with this post.

I will say that this post was delayed a little more by this weeks events. What am i talking about…

Siggraph 2008

So every year, one week in August is an opportunity for almost every major and minor cg software company to show whats coming up in the future months. Its like E3 or GDC. More like GDC because people also come to show off their technology and how they did it.

Autodesk’s Users Group will probably be the talking point along with Zbrush (which at the time of writing this has yet to publicly discuss Zbrush 3.5 ). But autodesk has made a major effort for those who cannot attend to put the entire week long event online (live streaming) and the User’s Group Presentation was about 4 hours long (I watched 90%, just before the sun came up ).

There were no crashes unfortunately hehe, but there was on Tuesday on the live stream. I just caught a guy showing of the rendering capabilities (which were amazing) and the program died. All he kept saying was “this is bad, this is bad”.

Hehe poor fella

I gotta say though I agree with many that the next version of Mudbox looks like it could have the edge on Zbrush, but i cant rule anything out until Pixologic say anything.

Phew!.

Hope you enjoyed the read, images and videos. The next post might be a comp of speed sculpts or a shader i want to write/create. These project post take a lot of time so im sure you will appreciate if i have to put in one or two posts about other stuff im working on.

Until then.

Take care.

-andy

Re-dubbed, Re-edited, Revitalized!!!

Hey guys,

First off, i think its time for me to stop wondering if people are reading/viewing this blog. This week was particularly good in terms of views and i dont think that 1,800 are just random hits (although one could argue that). I have the feeling some of you check back here quite often so here is something i have spent time to “re-produce” just for you guys.

If you listen to the video it will explains its origins, im not going to waste valuable reading space.

I know i stutter and stumble my way through it (like Hugh Grant in some stupid movie) but I hope it is of a high standard and hopefully in the future i will re-re-release a downloadable version.

So for now, enjoy.

Next i will be making/documenting a more valiant effort at anatomy modelling. The last attempt which you can view down the blog was pretty poor. So i have my subjects and i am ready to go. I have at least 5 models i want to do but it might take a while and become a little monotonous so i will post/recompile some of my old posts from a previous blog into this one. they had tips and tricks and just various modelling perspectives that i thought people would enjoy reading.

Houdniks!!!

Dont worry. Next post.

MORE HOUDINI FUR!!!!!