HARDCORE MODELING!: 80's cartoon: Smurf madness!

#61

I would really like to do it too. I spent some time trying to pose Hefty and Smurfette the way I showed a few posts back, unfortunately the poses are a little too complex for my transposing skills, and it turns out that their heads are too big for them to stand close enough together to look good. If I have Issues like this for trying to relate all 10 smurfs to eachother I’ll never be able to finsih in time. Installing my copy of xsi 6 student edition to see if my key is still valid. If so, I’ll try and do a quick rig and see if that works out better.

#62

Not sure about LW but in Maya you would be able to rig one of the smurfs and use that rig for all the other smurfs, with a little tweaking.

Still, you might be right. And, as mentioned your new scene idea is really still very cool too :slight_smile:

#63

Ok I need some suggestions here, people. I`ve made a hybrid of my two environment ideas and this is something I think can work for me. I desperately want to get back into character detailing, however I cannot proceed until my environment is finalized. Family Photo? Gargamel’s house? Why not both, I thought. So here we have “A Picnic under Gargamel’s Shadow”.

I’ve spread out some smurfs here on a human sized picnic blanket. I’m toying with a couple ideas and back stories to tie it together.

  1. Gargamel has set a trap: he says “This glade is so disgustingly prety, the smurfs won’t POSSIBLY be able to stay away once I lay out a picnic” Sure enough, once the smurfs see the picnic, they go for lunch. I would not include the family photo idea at all in this one.

3)A Human picnic, with a bunch of props such as big baskets and a large bottle of wine and general picnic stuff. The humans are away on a walk by the river, so the Smurfs take advantage and have their own picnic at the site.

2)The Smurfs lay their own picnic (blanket will have to be scaled down) by the foot of the bridge.

The last 2 ideas are more condusive to my original family photo idea, only it would be an “in action” shot. What I mean by this is that it would be a scene where the smurfs are gathering together, with Papa Smurf ready to take a picture, rather than the render being a photograph.

Which do you guys prefer? Or if you have other ideas, please share. I`ve had this block up since friday and it’s driving me nuts.

#64

EVILLLLLL LITTLE SMURRRFFFFFS! KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!!! :scream:

This is going to be funny. Keep up the good work, Rage. :cool:

#65

I think if you’re going to go for family photo then you should go for it hard … so benches with the smurfs attempting to line up together - probably each one doing something typical for them so like hefty lifting one bench on an angle in front of smurfette etc.

Otherwise I think any of the setup shots could be really nice if you treat it as a very much ‘in action’ type thing. Almost like a classical painting of a scene, with all the small details of the unfolding event.

:slight_smile:

#66

Thank you Axiomatic, I really appreciate the suggestions. You gave me a great idea!
WIP’s to come tonight.

-Rage

#67

Great start, design of the head’s looking interesting, reminds me of Brian Froud’s fantasty work, agree with rasmusW on revising the eyes and torso, as well as the feet and hands, also that last displacement pass isn’t really adding allot, otherwise great progress. Regarding the concepts, the “Human picnic” idea could be interesting, that could totally work, the Gargamel trap is kinda cliche IMHO, just my 2 cents though…!

#68

Thanks Justame.

Here’s a quick sketch of my intended setup. Small variations will change, such as exact position of the smurfs, but this is the general idea. Hope you like my drawing skills. They haven’t much improved since I was 2.

-Rage

#69

Lol at the improvement or lack of since 2!

Latest scene looks great, just a shame 401 isn’t out yet huh? Be nice to see some sexy grass, can’t believe I said sexy grass! I think the idea of the scene being outside will work better too, faster render times anyway :slight_smile:

#70

mmmm…sexy grass…

Lol thanks Scott. I agree wholeheartedly with you about modo 401. Hair would be a very welcome feature for this project, but replicators would have come in really handy too. I’m working on the tree which will be in the background, and have instanced leaves. I’ve got about 2000 leaves instanced and it’s really starting to slow down. Render takes about 30 minutes to go through the whole scene before rendering (renders out in about 30 seconds, though-with GI). Anyway, here is my technique:

1)Modeled a tree
2)modeled a leaf and placed it outside of the camera view.
3)modeled some spheres, cut them in half, and rotated them into place to act as stand-in branches.
4)using the meshpaint tool, I painted instances all over the half spheres.

*I had to draw all the instances as bounding boxes beause OpenGL would have freaked out if it had to draw all tha geometry. Not that my leaf had a lot of polys, but 2000 instances add up fast.

*Maya’s Artisan would have been a fantastic tool for this, but alas I do not have maya :frowning:

-Rage

#71

Looks like a neat scene you’ve planned there!

For some reason the camera angle doesnt sit well with me, but since its only a quick sketch its nothing to fuss about right now.

Keep 'em coming!

Cheers!

#72

I agree. I’m actually having quite a bit of trouble with this and I know exactly why: Scale.

The Smurfs are Smurf-sized (they are about 3 inches tall), but the rest of the environment is scaled to humans. This creates difficulties when trying to orient the camera. ie focusing on tiny meshes seems to make the camera go screwy, and also gives issues when selecting polys and whatnot. When the smurf is in a scene by himself it’s fine, but when put up against the big bad world… :banghead:
If you have any suggestions for cool angles for a situation like this, I’m all ears (or eyes, i guess).

Ok. So it turns out that all those instances was just too much to handle for my pc; in fact, probably for most pc’s. So I headed in another direction and was able to come up with a concept that would solve 2 of the problems I’ve been having recently. Here’s a dead type tree stump I modeled in modo then detailed in zbrush…

This solved my tree problem. Also, it solved my issue I was having with style contrast between the smurf village (which if you remember as I was trying out different ideas, looked too cartoony compared to the smurfs). Tonight I will model mushrooms that will be stuck to the stump, which will create some landings along the trunk. From there I will have a go at a much simpler version of the ewok village, with rope bridges and ladders and all sorts of trinkets. I won’t go crazy on detail, as this tree will be either in the middle or back ground. and perhaps even blurred a little with a slight dof in the final render. But I’ll worry about that when I get there. :smiley:

-Rage

#73

For the bark I made some custom Alphas and thought I’d share my technique as well as the alphas themselves.

1)searching google I found images of bark that I liked, saved to disk, then brought into photoshop.

2)desaturated.

3)I tweaked the levels and curves for each color channel until I got the right contrasts.
I didn’t spend a ton of time doing this, but a little attention is better than none. I just wanted to make sure I was maximizing my range of black to white.

4)ran filter–>other–>highpass at between 2 to 5 pixels depending on the image.

That’s it. I could have made a radial gradient around the image to get a more graded alpha towards the edges, but that’s what radial fade in ZB is for. I’d rather not destroy any of the values unless i have to.

Here are the alphas. Feel free to grab them.

If the frequency is too high to use, just run a gaussian blur at 1 pixel on them.

-Rage

#74

Tree stump is looking cool, is that a ZB version brought into modo or are you simply using displacements driven by a UV map?

Don’t get too carried away as you don’t want to be running out of memory when populating your scene like the previous trees!? You could use a few stencil maps in the background to give the impression there is lot’s of BG detail…

Keep up the good work

#75

Thanks mate.

the tree stump is being displaced by a 32 bit floating point .tiff driven by UV’s. Just a basic multidisplacement 3 zplug export.

It looks a little weird because of the ambient occlusion overlay I put on. I set it to only the occlude the stump to save time, but because of the way Modo exports the different passes I couldn’t get an accurate selection in photoshop.

render time took 56 seconds on the stump alone. Total scene weight was about 1.5 million polys after displacement. GI was enabled.

-Rage

#76

The stump looks really nice, and thanks for sharing your process. One thing I have to say is, your art style might be going a little all over. The tree looks more realistic, detailed whatever, in comparison to the smurfs. I know your not done with the character but just throwing that out there.

#77

Thanks cbeese.
Im going for a slightly stylized look. A little realistic, but not quite. Somewhere halfway between realistic and cartoony, I guess. Ill keep your crit in mind, however, as I get more detail in.

Theres no WIP images to upload at the moment, but my weekend was full of progress. I got my camera angle worked out, my environment is mostly blocked in, and Ive sculpted some mushrooms that still need more work. A Lot of trial and error (it seems that as soon as there`s a new mesh into zbrush, it comes with it’s own set of problems that need to be troubleshot).
I deleted much of the stump that I had, because most of it won’t be seen, so that I could get the most amount of polys in the right areas and not kill my cpu doing it.

New WIP images will be up by tomorrow AM.

*Off topic: Man, There’s so many entrys in this Challenge I’m having a hard time keeping up on all of them AND my own entry. This is a great theme and It’s nice to see all these new faces on the HMC forum.

Cheers
-Rage

#78

I like the Stump Rage but I agree with the other comment that you’ll need to be careful of the line between realism and comic.

One thing that I was thinking about is that often bark has edges and crevasses. I recently had to make a bunch of photo-real bark creatures for a short film and I found having some good Edge textures of the bark helped define the areas between Bark and Wood, if you know what I mean. I think it added something very positive to the over-all work in that case.

Just a thought :slight_smile:

#79

Thanks for sharing your techniques Rage, a lot to learn from here :slight_smile:

Looking forward to updates :slight_smile:

#80

Gnarly old tree you got there Rage. Looking really good.