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Features | |
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Last Airbender |
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Grey's Anatomy Promo VFX |
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Interview with Bobby Chiu |
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License to dream |
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Focus : Gears Of War 3 |
News Headlines | |
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Dragon Age 2 |
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Bioshock Infinite |
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Time travellers Comic |
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Envirometer |
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Thelma and Louise Remake |
Other Features | |
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Interview With Nick Harris |
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Making Art for Ipad |
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Making VFX for Ben Hur Remake |
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Interview : Mike winkelmann |
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Baby Data |
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I settled on a green, spotted, leathery look in order to better flesh out the gremlin idea. I always build all my textures at a massive resolution in case I ever need to render something for a gigantic poster print. I like the flexibility of sss materials as well because you can add details on different levels to achieve many different looks. Due to the way I pelted my model, and because I wanted to potentially allow for close-ups on his face, I made different textures for the head and body. I decided the outermost layer would be mostly a low contrast image. I wanted the spots and darker coloring on his skin to only show through from lower layers. I ended up creating maps for his diffuse, epidermal and subdermal skin layers, as well as bump and spec maps.
The eyes were done using a sphere with the eyeball color and bump images mapped onto it, but with no specularity. The front of the sphere with the iris was flattened and then the entire thing was sheathed in another sphere with a small bulge over the iris. This sphere was made transparent and used raytraced refraction with an ior equal to that of the human cornea. This gave the eye a more realistic look when viewed from the side as well as a simple way for handling specular shine without having to use a map.
With most of the model textured, I did several test renders with nice lighting in order to see how it was coming along. These tests often illuminate problems, such as UV stretching, and other areas that could use changes. It was only after several test renders that I decided the gremlin needed a cuter look and gave him his purple stomach.
Satisfied with his look it was time to rig him. Again, an admission: I am no Jason Schleifer. I can create some relatively decent rigs that will do the job, but there are many others who are much, much better. I decided that having put so much work into this character I wanted a very good rig to animate him. Unfortunately, most rigs that you can download are already bound to skeletons and they do not react particularly well to being dramatically modified to fit a squat little gremlin. What I really needed was not so much a premade rig, but a means to create such a rig.
I found such a thing a while back in the form of another unbelievably awesome plugin, made by John Doublestein, called the JTD Rigging Tools. This spectacular toolset allows you to create an amazingly powerful rig, piece by piece, so long as you are using an appropriately named skeleton. The easiest way to go about doing this is to simply download the skeleton he has on his website and arrange it to fit your model. Then you load up the tools and go to work. The rig creates a spine that can be toggled to be stretchy and is full of useful control objects. The arms and legs can be stretchy, but even more important is a built in, snappable switch for IK and FK animation, as well as a menu driven option for switching parents for the various control objects. In a word, it is incredible.
