It turned out Fantastic!
B-Movie Entry: Krishnamurti M. Costa
drako3d
#552
Wow man excellent work , very good synthesis.A big bravo…
IT CAME FROM NOWHERE…
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?threadid=861334
shocksplash
#553
hey! it’s been one hour i’m reading this thread since i haven’t kept track of your work during the contest cause i’m not really a forum guy …but your work is really FREAKIN awesome and i find it very nice that you post you’re WIP. for a newbie in 3d it is awesome to see that!
i tried to understand something from your workflow but didnt find it in the thread, so i’ll ask it and hope it wasn’t answered and i just haven’t read it!
i don’t understand exactly what was rendered in zbrush and what was rendered in maya? what i think i understood was that you polypainted your wip in zbrush, but what happened with the polypaint? did it become a texture? that means you had to do the UV BEFORE polypainting right? and when rendering in maya, was the polycount high? cause the picture I THINK were rendered in maya seemed REALLY high in poly… or maybe was it all in the normal maps?
and what about the lowpoly version, when in the process of modeling/texturing did you finalize the lowpoly?
i have the impression you did some renders in zbrush that had different elements using different shaders, am i right? did you find it useful for the final results or it was used only for the WIPs?
and one last thing while im at it… in the thread i read about software used for rendering (modo and others i think). are these software used to rendered scenes that are to high in polys? i only know how to use mentalray in 3ds max and i feel im limited since my comp has difficulty rendering scene over 1.5 million polys… how bis in polys your final scene was for exemple?
sorry i know these are a lot a questions, but you since like someone how would ACTUALLY answer the question he is asked and i hope someday of becoming an amazing 3d artist too, so my curiousity might be annoying 
thanks for you time anyway!
one of my favorite colors.
Antropus
#556
Thank you so much for your kind words guys!
Sorry I’m not visiting it more frequently to answer some questions. Life got really busy lately o_O
shocksplash,
Thanks. I’ll try to address your questions:
All renders starting on page 3 or so were done in Modo. There are ZBrush screencaps in the mix but talking about render, it’s Modo.
The models were not super dense but were not lowpoly either. I exported mid-res meshes (around 60k each model) and applied normal maps generated in ZBrush. They look highres for this reason but they are really not dense.
About polypaint, since the highres meshes were around 4 million polys each character, I could get a fair amount of details on the polypaint. The way I work is a little bit like this:
- Import some old basemesh
- sculpt it in ZBrush without paying to much attention to topology
- retopo the model in Maya using the live function or even inside of ZBrush
- UV the mesh in Maya (now you can use the UV master and do it without leaving ZBrush)
- bring the new model to ZBrush and finish all the sculpting, posing and polypaiting
- export a midres version of the model back to Modo
- generate a normal map, a displacement map and color maps (cavity, color, specular etc) from ZBrush to be used in Modo
So, yeah, the meshes need to be UVd before you export the maps, so you can just bake all the color information from the polypaint to a color map (don’t forget to flip the map vertically…)
About the ZBrush screencaps showing the models with different materials, think about that as a previz of the final renders. It’s really just to have an idea.
About rendering highres models, like I said I tried to be economic and use midres models, not highres but even though, at the end with everything combined, my scene was certainly over a million polys. Modo still rendered it but it got trouble when I had all characters with fur in the same scene. My machine has only 8gb of ram and I think it’s time for me to update it to something with at least 12gb, running under x64 of course.
Cheers,
-Kris
shocksplash
#558
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply! 3d arts is a really time consuming domain and I find it quite rare, for that reason, to have this much information from a pro.
You answered all my questions yes! What I really needed to know is if everything rendered outside of Zbrush was retopoed or if there some magical technique I didn’t know.
Can I ask you how much of Modo is indispensable to your work? I don’t know any other render than Mentalray or 3dsmax’s default scanline render and I’m wondering if I’m missing on something?
Anyway I’ll make sure to check your new stuff, it is really inspiring!
dodgeOrBURN
#561
Absolutely awsome from start to finish! Thank you so much for showing all your WIPs- it is really inspirational. Best of luck for the challenge!
Antropus
#562
coolkonrad,
thanks man! (but I would not hold my breath, seriously…)
shocksplash,
No, no magic 
About Modo, this is actually the only time I ever used it on my work and I think it has a TON of potential. Not perfect but I really like it!
gpepper,
don’t think so, but thanks!
Mayuresh-Salunke.
thanks!
dodgeOrBURN,
thank you so much!
-Kris
Jinian
#563
Looking really good Kris… hopefully you still have a non krappatized version(hehe…) seeing how you took the whole render and made it look like a b-movie poster from the past… and then upload and show that to us too.
Spin99
#565
Hi Kris
Quite a nice surprise to browse old CGTalk and find out a new challenge just ended.
Amazingly there’s a Kris entry and guess who wins again? deservedly of course.
So congrats as always I really loved this one – more mature than ever imho must be your ILM work?
So super pinup, bonobos and arrghh – Taxman…
I have one question hope I’m still in time to get a reply.
It’s about your mesh posing techniques.
You seem to break up your meshes before posing.
This makes a lot of sense and I think I’ve seen it done professionally before.
Just wanted to ask if you rig your open meshes? If you use ZBrush for posing them?
Specially in a time limited competition like this one. What about after you’re happy with the pose?
Do you merge everything back together and brush over it?
What about the UV’s do you not have problems with them at this stage?
Is there a workflow for this that you could share a little maybe?
I’d love to learn a bit more on posing since it’s probably where I battled before.
Otherwise really amazing and a pleasure to follow your thread as always.
This side going crazy organizing an art exhibition here in Africa and looking forward
to getting back into Cg sometime. Awesomeness.
Antropus
#567
Kong-in-Chains,
I know the feeling man! I wish I could stick with a better version of it instead of trying to ‘krappatize’ it for the B-movie sake
I might re-render some of the elements in a better way but I just got tired of the image as a whole. I still like the characters though…
Thanks!
carlossilvapb,
thanks man
Spin99,
thanks!
The broken up meshes are for reference only. They are a proxy version of the original meshes, at low res and they are not really rigged, but the parts are rather parented to each other so I can pose it roughly. Once I’m ok with the rough pose, I export all broken parts as a single mesh, append it to my subtool in ZBrush and use Transpose Master to match the pose. After that, I then fix the problems, mostly weird joint deformations, by resculpiting those areas in Zbrush.
About the UVs, they were done even before I chopped the base mesh to create the proxy. So, even cut, the final res mesh and the low res proxy share the same UV space and texture, already started by then.
-Kris
Nickillus
#568
Brilliant stuff from you again Kris - and such a deserving prize winner. Many congratulations.
Spin99
#569
@ Antropus
Thanks Kris! I would have never guessed btw
Sounds like a great idea to parent mesh objects to each other for posing.
Have to try it in SoftImage sometime.
So maybe I can pose a broken low-res mesh use Gator to transfer to the mapped mesh
and then go about sculpting. Still have to get hold of that copy of ZBrush though.
Maybe I’ll join again on a competition here sometime I miss polys and brushes bad by now :buttrock: