Dick Ma - Demo Reel (Repacked)

[dickma]

Demo Reel Run-down


Attention: All stuff shown in the Demo Reel is solely produced by Dick Ma Hing-shun.


1. Hugh Laurie as Dr Gregory House

- Part 1, 360˚ turnable presentation, full modeling, texturing and rendering, using Lightwave 3D and Softimage|XSI
- Rigged and animatable
- Part 2, Walking test with cane, for demonstrating cloth simulations on blue shirt, suit and trousers, using Syflex in Softimage|XSI
- Part 3, Close up, emphasis on fast skin shader (SSS), hair modeling and shading, and geometry displacement (Zbrush maps) With facial morphing test for animation, and showing the synchronization of the skin layer and the facial hair layers, like eyebrows and beards.

2. Sea warrior

- 360˚ turnable presentation, full modeling, texturing and rendering, using Lightwave 3D and Softimage|XSI
- Rigged for pose.
- Syflex used for cloth simulation on garments.
- Long Hair styling and setup
- Close-up for modeling and texturing detail presentation, including fast skin shader (SSS) and hair modeling and shading.
- This work is being published on issue 83, 3D World Magazine
3. Chelonian

- Camera tilt and pan, focusing on the main subject for full presentation of full modeling, texturing and rendering, using Lightwave 3D. Depth of Field enabled
- Geometry displacement (Zbrush maps) is used on the Tortoise’s shell and body
- Rigged for pose
- All plants in the scene are modeled and distributed to form a scene.
- This work is being published on issue 72, 3D World Magazine
4. Robot

- 360˚ turnable presentation, full modeling, texturing and rendering, using Lightwave 3D
- Rigged for pose.
- Exclusive presentation for close-up, with raw shading and lights, with wireframe on top. Robot’s door is opened for showing the cabin.
Animation/effects:

- Originally the animation is an entry for the VFS-Youtube Scholarship Competition 2008 – “What Matters to You”, later renamed the animation as “A Simple Leaving Story”.
- Dick Ma worked as a Director and he is responsible for the whole part of animation productions.
- Full modeling, texturing using Lightwave 3D and rendering using Softimage|XSI, emphasis on using Toon-shader and Ink tracer for the styling.
- All sceneries are build up in 3D and rendered as 2D toon, with post-production effects.
- Beautiful transition effects from one scene to another scene.
- Various animations on the main character and the cat.

[David-J]

Good job.

A couple of thing I noticed that in my opinion can be improved.

1st Character
The shaders on the coat and the pants need tweaking and more texture work. The pants seem to look a little bit like plastic and the coat is very generic.
I like how the skin shader is working, a little bit of more fine tuning and it would be awesome.
The wrinkles on his forehead look completely unrealistic, they don't follow any anatomy and their distribution is pretty even.
The animation needs more work, serves the purpose of showing the syflex but not animation skills.

2nd character
The rock needs more work on the texturing and needs to be less smooth.
Now that you know sss I suggest you apply it on this character.

Turtle.
The texture on the legs seems to be off scale, too large.
Tweak the skin shader to look like a reptile skin.

Robot

I liked it.

Animation

Less symmetrical posing.
More movement on the spine and COG when he walks, looks stiff.


For the generalist part I think you need more effects to cover all your bases. Like (fire, smoke, dust, particle collision, etc.) specially now that XSI has ICE.

Hope all this helps in the future. good luck

[dickma]

Thank you David-J. Here is my answers.

Character1 (House)Originally, because this time I would like to rely on cloth simulations to create the wrinkles of the cloths. However, it depends on the mesh density of the cloth (more dense = more wrinkles) I didn't draw any bump for faking the wrinkles, however, I do apply a basic bump for cloth texture. May be because the demo reel lossy resolution on youtube, and I have apply "Multi-Resolution Texture", and also a high-level of anti-ailasing when rendering. The bumps isn't noticeble. The coat texture is also affected as well.

About the forehead wrinkles, one way it is affected by the displacement map, but basically, the base mesh structure can do morphing to enhance the wrinkles(deeper) and should be anatomy correct, because displacement map is "static". May be I didn't exaggerated the facial morph great enough.

About the animation demo for showing syflex, I can't think about a better solution on how to demostrate the cloth sim. At least there's no pentration of the cloth layers. Cloth sim are all calculations, no blends, no loops in the demo reel.


Character2 I supposed the character, the whole thing is wet (the original work as a sea surface with waves, but rendertime is too long), so the level of specular in this work generally is high. The character is also applied (SSS) but I apply a high level of specular, Personally I rather like the skin effect of Character 2 more than house.

About the turtle and the robot, I have no specific comments.

And about the animation/fx section. because the clip is extracted from the competition, there should be a limitation of production time (about 5 weeks work for a 2:30 mins). May be my animation skill level is just "accceptable" however, I do think it is worth to put the animation into my demo reel because I would like to show diversity and style. My problem solving and tricks during animation production.

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