Last week I had the chance to give another advanced course at the Blender Institute in Amsterdam.
After the course I stayed a couple of days to hang around with the developers who met for the blender winter camp. I took some photos, here are some of them.
Since I haven’t done any realistic modeling recently, I’ve decided to give the blending life contest a go and try modeling a photorealistic human character. It’s fun doing this kind of stuff again after a couple of years modeling monsters, rodents and bunnies. I’ve certainly learned a lot about keeping meshes clean during big buck bunny. Even though the characters were not photorealistic, the amount of freedom of movement (squash & stretch) they had to be capable of, forced me to rethink my approach to developing mesh topology.
long time no image!
this model has been lying around for a couple of months, it actually started out as a sculpting test during peach in amsterdam. this week i decided to finally get my act together and finalize it.
this is not a dinosaur.
since i didn’t have the powerful 8 core / 8 gb memory monster machine i had in the blender institute, i had to cut back one level of subdivision. which is not too bad since the surface texture does a decent job of providing addtional detail. here’s a shot at the highest level, with no textures:
the model and the concept around this image evolved quite a bit, here are a few of the design stages i went through. eventually i decided the model is powerful enough (and me being too lazy…), too much environment surrounding the scene would only distract. so that’s why i opted for the “simple statue” type of shot.
this was an early textured version, can you spot the barcode? i had a lot of fun making the skin look less reptilian and more like a mammal.
a test with blender’s fluid sim and a screenshot of the final scene. the workflow for the model was pretty straight-forward. i first modeled the creature in subdivision surface which i then detailed in sculpt mode. from that i extracted a high dynamic range displacement map which was projected back on the original model (also including an armature for basic deformations, extremely easy to set up in a matter of seconds thanks to heat weighting!) the model was posed, lit, shaded, rendered and composited in blender.
thanks for watching,
.andy