Some stuff from the last gig [Archive]

SpiralFace

03-31-2009, 03:53 PM

Here is some stuff that was made for the last gig I did for the "Monsters vs. Aliens The Game" pre-rendered cinematics.

Mainly did texture work and hair simulations for the project, but got a chance to model the cowboy Since one wasn't made for the movie.

Enjoy.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v641/shadow_s1ayer/MvA_Cowboy-1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v641/shadow_s1ayer/MvA_Enrico.jpg

SpiralFace

03-31-2009, 05:13 PM

Sadly I'm not cleared too.

Along with the world of Hair sim's and pre-rendered Cinematic's also comes the territory of closely guarded Company Assets and IP's.

I can give some Insight into the pipeline though.

Almost all the character modeling assets for the cinematics where conversions from the original NURBS patch models used for the movie. And even the Cowboy that was an original creation used many of the Movie Model's as a template to ensure that the look ended up being the same while sticking to a strict deadline. The patch models had to be converted and then stitched together into a cohesive model before being set out for UV's. Individual UV sets where made for every section of different materials. Or simply used the primitive's UV's to save on time. UV's that needed a fabric needed special attention to ensure that their was very little warping between the patches.

A separate material was made for every change of material. Almost all of these assets with the notable exception of the skin shaders where tillable using blend materials to break up the monotony and tillable look a bit. This allowed us to get a great amount of fine detail across large surfaces without needing to go overboard on the size of the base textures.

An individual shader was made up for every type of material, and this was used as a template for all these types of materials. So the fabric shader on one model is pretty much the same across all of the models, and only use different texture inputs and color values where applicable. In this way, we can recycle texture assets as long as the UV's where properly layed out.

Skin was made using the Mental ray Fast Subsurface Scattering Shader, and hair was used using 3ds Max's native hair simulator, which is Identical to the Maya plug in, "Shave and a Hair cut."

So overall, a single character averaged out to around 7-12 unique shaders on the model with maps used when needed, but when we could get away with it, we made the shaders procedural.