Will's WIP thread
Oso3D
Posts: 15,011
Now that I'm dipping my toes into modeling/rigging, thought I'd start this.
So far I've managed to make a bendable column (woo!) and a really really terrible burger with legs thing.
Working on box modeling, still VERY new at it, but happy to have made some decent progress. I'm not looking forward to trying to rig it, but at least I've started with something with only 4 limbs. ;)
Here's the crawler I'm working on now. It's at 12k polygons, shooting for about 4x that so that it won't fall apart when bending. I'm not sure splaying the legs out will make rigging harder or easier... guess I'll find out. Although if worse comes to worst, I guess I could just rotate the legs.
Things I've learned today: Be sure to toggle smoothing on/off. Working too much with smoothing on, you can end up with a mess. Too little smoothing, and you aren't inspired to push the mesh to sharper corners.
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Oh, I should mention that I'm modeling in Carrara. I have Hexagon, but I've been using some form of Carrara since the 1990s, so... very familiar with the feel and style of the UI
Here's my previous attempt at rigging. The legs move, but... man, it's a mess. And the model is terrible. ;)
Will be watching with a great deal of interest.
Another tip: if your polygons are ending up skewed a bunch, you can do Loop (select every line in a cross section) and Scale to shove the polygons into a straight line (from one side). You'll have to do some touch ups, but still.
In my case, I wanted to have the middle of the creature bend, but my mesh was sort of slanted like a < orientation. Which, as far as I can figure, will make for really messed up rigging.
This third pass (after two tesslations to double polygon count) is proving a lot slower than the last two combined. I don't know if that's going to be even worse on the next pass...
Very happy to see you doing this, Will. There are some general topology links and videos that are software agnostic that are gathered in some of the threads in the Carrara forum. For example, there are techniques for the back of knees. elbows, and other joints to minimize scrunching. You may want to think about these techniques when designing your meshes even though you won't be rigging in Carrara.
Here is an example of a more general discussion of limbs that might appy to your custom figures.
http://polycount.com/discussion/61079/low-polygon-joints-what-is-the-best-way
wgdjohn's modeling thread and my Brash Lonergan thread in the Carrara forum both have links to more detailed resources.
EDIT : Sorry, here is the list I meant to link, but the top link is OK, just not with as much stuff.
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorials/
Haha, I keep screwing up posting the link on limbs! Here it is, I swear it.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Limb_Topology
Not to toot my own horn (toot!) but my flat white + outline shaders are great for illustrating stuff like this, highlighting details and so on.
Here's phase 3 or so, 12k polygons. I think I have it to my satisfaction and ready for tesselation.
I cleaned up the polygons. Again, new at this and realized that the mesh was wandering all over the place, which could have problems with UV mapping and rigging. I found that doing Loop + Scale could take a wandering slice of lines and shove them into something clean.
Bookmarked! :)
Will be watching with interest. :)
Nice to see you made your own space. It is always a pleasure seeing your wips.
Experimenting with shaders didn't feel quite as WIP-ish.
Half formed burger monsters, much more so...
Still slowly working on that critter, but thought I'd take a quick break to practice rigging. This is a fully posable cube and sphere figure.
The cool rounded corners and fluid look is thanks to Iray Uber 'rounded corners' feature; the blocks are actually only 6 face objects.
Oh that's cool! Nicely done, Will! It looks almost like one of those artist pose helper models.
Definitely inspired by that, but also a sort of... I dunno, thinking of weird scifi covers from the 70s/80s.
And here's another pose. Had to fix the joints a bit, I misunderstood some stuff.
Again, the 'rounded corners' I've had people gush about is, indeed, pretty awesome.
Looking good, Will.
Here is a thread that contans some good information on uvmapping and unwrapping a model with an organic shape in Carrara. Try to focus on the constructive posts by 3DAge.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/101628/#Comment_101628
And my first ever morph!
Just a silly quick thing, but had to work through the process of applying morphs (which is filled with lots of potential mistakes that are uninformative)
I've not been able to figure it out. lol It's a mystery to me. I've tried to do morphs for G3 but for some reasons it always ends up messing up the teeth, even if they morph isn't ANYWHERE NEAR the face. I can do a morph on the waste and for some reason it messes up G3 teeth when I try to apply it.
I finally understood what I had heard other people comment on, that the base mesh isn't enough to do really fine details without the special HD thing only some vendors have. Poop. Which means creating displacement maps. Double poop.
As it turned out, though... it's actually not super hard, if you have a 3d painter. People don't seem to regard Carrara really highly, but it does a lot of stuff, in a cheap and functional and easy to understand (IMO) format.
What I did was simply use 3d paint (which I had never even noticed before -- it's the little pencily icon in the toolbar at the top, fourth from the left). I painted as regular color for ease, with symmetry. Once I had a color map saved, I popped it into Photoshop, blurred it a bunch (Gaussian 8 bit?), and then put it in Displacement channel. With a Subd of 3, the displacement looked decent. I rendered the following at subd4 just to make it extra crisp.
This makes me tolerably confident that I could make interesting characters without HD morphs.
So my crawler guy is at 12k polygons. I was originally intending to tesselate at least once more, but looking at Genesis, which is only 18k... huh.
I think I'll leave it as is, poke a little more, then try to work out UV mapping and rigging. Woo!
The displacement test I just made makes me feel tolerably confident that I can paint some decent details in.
Carrara has a pretty reasonable UV unwrap thing. Except... it's glitchy. I just spent most of the day trying to unwrap it and Carrara spent most of the day randomly undoing seams I made. ...
Anyway, here is the crawler with a fairly quick, terrible paint job. Need to improve the paint job, bump/displacement paint... thankfully, with NGS anagenessis applied, doesn't look half bad. But still.
The UV map isn't perfect, but it's reasonably functional with no obviously weird spots.
Then, eventually, ... rigging. dun dun dun
In addition to the critter also working on learning how to do character morphs.
I've long wanted to improve 'quadruped humanoids'; normally when you bend the neck enough, you have to distort the mesh so much it looks terrible.
Well, I have the beginnings of an 'otterfolk' morph that tilts the head back, flattens the skull, and evens out the resulting distortion. It messes up eye joints, but I can live with that (it's not hard to adjust, it just wouldn't make for a salable product, if I cared)
First is the base morph, second is after a lot of extra morphs from other stuff plus Rawart's excellent CatWorld Panther skin.
Cool stuff in here Will! I've been trying to figure out how to do morphs in Blender for about 6 months. There was always some setting I was messing up when exporting and importing and exporting again to import back into DS. I always got that dreaded message about meshes not matching! I finally figured out all of the right settings and made my first 'weird' little morph myself just last week. I was so proud of myself! It wasn't easy getting there.
I have not tried modeling in Carrara yet. Still just trying to get a feel for the program, but I'd like to get to that point one day soon. I like the robot guy. Very cool. That quadruped humanoid looks interesting. Looks like you're having fun. :)
I am! The hard thing about the morph import was that there's not much indication of what you did wrong. But finally figured out most of the weirdness.
For those 'at home':
Make sure the figure you modify was exported in Base Resolution. Make sure it STAYS in base resolution (IE: don't save it again with smoothing (In Carrara) and definitely don't tesselate/subdivide).
Make sure the figure you load the morph into is in Base Resolution.
(Those two are 80% of what I kept messing up)
Finally, when using Morph Loader Pro, change 'create control property' and 'reverse deformations' to Yes.
And that SHOULD do it.
Still not sure how to fix the eyes, though. Morph I made shifted the joint center of the eyes. Or, rather, failed to update the center. Not entirely sure how to fix that as a morph, though I could fix it on a single figure, which is probably what I'll do rather than saving the morph for use from every figure.
Hmm. What should I experiment with next. ;)
Still working on the crawler, but I need to take breaks to do other things. Still tinkering away at 'otterboy,' though the skins make him look more... catlike.
Maybe rigid armor, as per recent discussion...
Yeah, the base resolution thing messed me up a few times. The other thing was that when I imported into Blender I didn't know I was supposed to tell it to keep vertices. I didn't even know what that meant. It wasn't until I watched Sickleyield's morph tutorial from DS to Blender and back that I realized what I was doing wrong or, in this case, not doing right. The default import for Blender keeps vertices separate. Every time I tried to make a morph, I was moving body parts and couldn't figure out how to keep them all together and then DS would have a hissy fit and spit errors at me.
At least now, I know what to do and I learned how to create a preset in Blender so I just have to click a preset. Thanks, @Sickleyield! :)
I really like your green guy. Thats pretty impressive. I was happy I managed to get four walls, with windows and doors done lol. I do really like Carrara, as I am learning the shortcut keys and how to navigate a bit better its getting easier. The UV mapper hates me though.
The UV Mapper ... dear flipping gawd.
Yeah. I almost gave up modeling after wrestling with that all day.
Right? I wanted to put my computer through a window. I have a free uvmapper called uvmapper classic I might try if I can't get the uv mapper in Carrara under control. Although they assure me it gets easier over in the carrara forums lol.
I have UV Mapper, but it's not really useful for complicated stuff. I hear UV Mapper Pro might be, but it's been unavailable since September for some stupid reason.
My big problem was that for no reason I could figure out, Carrara would just randomly delete seams. Which would really mess up unfolding attempts.
I basically kept trying it for hours until it managed to work right.
Oh hey, maybe an alien dog? That might be fun and something people could easily use.
I just kept gettin a jumbled mess but I am pretty determined to figure it out. Grateful my children are grown though cause sometimes the swearing gets rather...loud.
I think an alien dog as well as other animals would be useful. I mean, different worlds would have different types of pets right? All those people on starships for years etc must have some kind of pets to keep them from going crazy