reel

Cat's food /  by Xuan Prada

Quick and dirty render that I did the other day.
Just testing my Promote Control for bracketing the exposures for the HDRI that I created for this image. Tried to do something very simple, to be achieved in just a few hours. Trying to keep realism, tiny details, bad framing and total lack of lighting intention.

Just wanted to create a very simple and realistic image, without any cinematic components. At the end, that's reality, isn't it?

Iron Man Mark 7 /  by Xuan Prada

Speed texturing & look-deving session for this fella.
It will be used for testing my IBLs and light-rigs.
Renders with different lighting conditions and backplates on their way.

These are the texture channels that I painted for this suit. Tried to keep everything simple. Only 6 texture channels, 3 shaders and 10 UDIMs.

Color

Color

Specular

Specular

Mask 1

Mask 1

Color 2

Color 2

Roughness

Roughness

Fine displacement

Fine displacement

Cubes tutorial /  by Xuan Prada

A few months ago, when my workmates from Double Negative were working on Transcendence, I saw them using Houdini to create such a beautiful animations using tiny geometries. They were like millions of small cubes building shapes and forms.
Some time later other people started doing similar stuff with Maya's XGen and other tools. I tried it and it works like a charm.

Frame from Transcendence.

Frame from Transcendence.

Frame from Transcendence.

Frame from Transcendence.

I was curious about these images and then decided to recreate something similar, but I wanted to do it in a simpler and quicker way. I found out that combining Cinema 4D and Maya is probably the easiest way to create this effect.

If you have any clue to do the same in Modo or Softimage, please let me know, I'm really curious.
This is my current approach.

  • In Cinema 4D create a plane with a lot of subdivisions. Each one of those subdivisions will generate a cube. In this case I’m using a 1000cm x 1000cm plane with 500 subdivisions.

  • Create a new material and assign it to the plane.

  • Select the plane and go to the menu Simulate -> Hair objects -> Add hair.

  • If you zoom in you will see that one hair guide is generated by each vertex of the plane.

  • In the hair options reduce the segments guides to 1 because we just need straight guides we don’t care about hair resolution.

  • Also change the root to polygon center. Now the guides growth from each polygon center instead of each vertex of the plane.

  • Remove the option render hair (we are not going to be rendering hairs) from the generate tab. Also switch the type to square.

  • Right now we can see cubes instead of hair guides, but they are so thin.

  • We can control the thickness using the hair material. In this case I’m using 1.9 cm

  • Next thing would be randomising the height. Using a procedural noise would be enough to get nice results. We can also create animations very quickly, just play with the noise values.

  • Remove the noise for now. We want to control the length using a bitmap.

  • Also hide the hair, it’s quicker to setup if we don’t see the hair in viewport.

  • In the Plane material, go to luminance and select a bitmap. Adjust the UV Mapping to place the bitmap in your desired place.

  • In the hair material, use the same image for the length parameter.

  • Copy the same uv coordinates from the plane material.

  • Add a pixel effect to the texture and type the number of pixels based on the resolution of the plane. In this case 500

  • Do this in both materials, the plane and the hair. Now each cube will be mapped with a small portion of the bitmap.

  • Display the hair system and voila, that’s it.

  • Obviously the greater contrast in your image the better. I strongly recommend you to use high dynamic range images, as you know the contrast ratio is huge compared with low dynamic images.

  • At this point you can render it here in C4D or just export the geometry to another 3D software and render engine.

  • Select the hair system and make it editable. Now you are ready to export it as .obj

  • Import the .obj in your favourite 3D software. Then apply your lighting and shaders, and connect the image that you used before to generate the hair system. Of course, you can control the color of the hair system using any other bitmap or procedurals.

  • In order to keep this work very simple, I’m just rendering a beauty pass and an ambient occlusion pass, but of course you can render as many aov’s as you need.

  • I also animate very quickly the translation of the hair system and added motion blur and depth of field to the camera to get a more dynamic image, but this is really up to you.

  • This is just the tip of the iceberg, with this quick and easy technique you can create beautiful images combining it with your expertise.

Skateboard screenshots /  by Xuan Prada

Just a few screenshots of my process working on the skateboard images that I posted  few days ago.

  • Jeans modelling in Zbrush.
  • Decimated model exported from Zbrush ready to be reconstructed in Modo.
  • Retopology process in Modo using the topology workspace.
  • UV mapping in Modo.
  • Final models in Modo.
  • Texture work in Mari.
  • Look-dev in Maya and Arnold.
  • Lighting blocking.
  • Final renders.

Lego /  by Xuan Prada

I continue with my transition to Modo. I already know more or less the basics of the software and I have adapted my way of working to be productive in Modo. It’s time to make my first image and put in practice all that I learnt last week.

I have chosen a simple theme. After watching The Lego Movie (and some great references that they used) I wanted to create something related with it. It’s simple enough to allow me to finish the image in half a day or so. Say hello to all my mates who worked on the movie, we worked together on Happy Feet while ago.

The model for the character is quite simple, perfect to try all the modeling tools that come with Modo. Great so far. The work plane is quite useful, love it.

Modo’s uv mapping tools are great and very fast. I love atlas projection and unwrap. I’ll be using them all the time. For this particular model I used only unwrap. Just select a few edgest and that’s it, done. I didn’t worry much about seams, I can fix that later in Mari.
I’m using only one UDIM, this model and textures are simple enough to use only un uv space.

I worked on the textures in Mari. I could have used Modo paint tools, but I’m used to paint in Mari, and it’s definitely faster and more powerful.

Only needed three texture channels. Color, Specular and Bump maps. I used two different bump maps, one with fine noise for the plastic, and another one with scratches and imperfections.
All the textures are 8k resolution sRGB and Scalar and 16bit .tiff

For the look-dev I created an Image Based Lighting rig. With an overcast HDRI, perfect to create atmospheric lighting without too much direct light coming from the sun. It gives me perfect reflections and nice contrast between light and shade.
Always working with a Linear Workflow.

Only used one single shader, with no layers. Simple shader with a bit of reflection driven by a specular map.

For the ground I used a simple grid sculpted in Zbrush. Just a few dunes and procedural noise to simulate sand.

I did a few tests to find the best way to setup Zbrush displacements in Modo.
I’ll be posting soon how to do it. It’s not that complicated :)

For lensing, I used a 50mm focal length camera. I created a low poly version of my characters and ground, just to block the camera angle and lighting.

Finally, I updated the proxy models with the final ones.
To lit the scene I used a nice high resolution panorama shot by myself. It gave me the perfect atmosphere and reflection for this shot. But I couldn’t get the perfect shadows.
I wanted to lit this like a miniature, so I wanted a very strong key light with a perfect and hard shadow. I just removed the sun from the HDRI and then added a 3D light just behind the characters.

I dind’t need to render aov’s or render passes, I just rendered a quick id matte to control the ground and the characters.

This is the final render.

And finally, the black and white image that I conceived from the very beginning.