Decade

Thanks ! Hopefully I'll do an update every day or two, but we'll see how it goes.

It's been ages since I posted any work, mainly due to personal projects getting sidelined by work stuff & ending up half-finished. Anyway, I have a tendancy to just post things when they're done but this time I want to do more of an actual WIP, although I have obviously put quite a bit of work in already. Over christmas, I visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with family & was inspired by a Chinese Coromandel Screen: http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/7/10223/10232/all/per_page/25/offset/0/sort_by/seqn./object/17562 The aim will be to produce a lightly-animated picture - I plan to follow the layout of these screens & have a main central picture, with the panels around the edges showing close-ups of different camera angles on parts of the scene. Characteristic of these paintings is the use of perspective where the horizontals & verticals are straight & there is no vanishing point. There is one type of Camera Projection in Cinema 4D that emulates this type of perspective - the 'Gentleman' projection. I quickly discovered that only the Standard & Physical render engines can support this projection. I had hoped to use this project as a test-bed for Cycles 4D but although it can do true Parallel cameras via it's 'Orthographic' option, it doesn't have anything like the 'Gentleman' projection with straight verticals & horizontals. Octane lacks even true parallel projection support, so that was out. It seems even Pro-Render can't support this projection, although I'm far from convinced it's as good as Standard/ Physical anyway. Ultimately the perspective is more important than the render engine - I don't want to just make an isometric compromise. I'm at least using it as a chance to finally explore node materials & the PBR workflow - using reflection as GI. I'm leaning on the excellent 'Chinese Patterns' C4D content browser download from right here on C4D Cafe. For plants I'll be using Forester as always & I've just begun to introduce some. Obviously the composition & landscape is super-WIP right now, although I've put a fair bit of time into modelling the buildings.

This should be what you're after:

Thanks Vozzz, The rest of these creature sculpts are up on my Behance portfolio: https://www.behance.net/Graeme_McD

Been a while since I did one of these - Modelling & sculpting a mix of Cinema 4D & ZBrush, render in Octane, plants from Forester.

Exactly that, I was talking about the Character object templates. So it's a custom rig, good work. It's a rule I have learned that it's almost impossible to make a rig that is completely bug-free until you or someone else has put it through it's paces with a test animation or two. It's just part of the process, you always find something to improve or fix.

No worries, you're right about the possibilities - you could have for example 4 events on the same slider - some kind of complex mechanical unfolding of different parts for example.

You need to use 2 range mapper nodes to split your slider - one with input range from 0 to 0.5 (0-50%) & one from 0.5 to 1 (50%-100%). You also need to clamp the mins & maxes. That takes care of splitting the slider output - now you need to set the range mapper node's output unit to something relevant - like degree for rotations for example & set your min max values. Then connect them to each to the object/s they should drive. The more you do Xpresso, the more you realise you use range mapper nodes almost every time !

Looks good to me ! Is it an advanced biped rig or a custom one ?

Thanks guys. It was fun to work on. I'm feeling in the mood for a dinosaur next.

This one is the Kirin - 'Japanese Unicorn'. As usual, modelling & sculpting in Cinema 4D, plants with Forester plugin, texture painting in Mudbox, render in Octane, a little post-work in Photoshop.

Great work ! The subtle imperfections on marvin's plastic look great.

Great short, really well-observed style. I loved the pose to pose feel of the character animation too. Really good sense of film-making in how it all comes together.

Like ABMotion says, you can use the UV offset parameter in the texture tag, linked via Xpresso to a 'vector' type user data set to 2D Vector field 'interface'. Then just tune it with a 'range mapper' XPresso node to your chosen control ('driver') until it works nice.

I do indeed. What you want to do is load each alternative mouth shape into a separate material. Then create a user data of 'integer' type, with the 'radio buttons' interface. Use Xpresso to connect the output of that user data to the a 'link list' node. Connect it to the 'index' input of the link list. Drag the materials into the link list in the same order as you added the radio buttons in the user data. Connect the 'link' output of the link list node to the 'texture tag' on your model. Connect it to the 'material' input (that's the 'material' link on the texture tag). This system has the advantage that it's 100% realtime as all the mats are already in ram, so no disk access slowing it down. Give me a minute & I'll try to dig out some screenshots.

Thanks, 3D-Pangel ! - If you see the time-lapse videos, the texture-painting takes a lot of time & it's not something I am particularly confident on/ enjoy. In the video, I leave the wings until near the end & flail around quite a bit before I get something that works. It's quite boring to watch even at 20x speed. So I'm heartened that you think it works well with the rest of the figure in the end. I'm planning to paint all future entries in this little series - even though it adds a lot to the time, I think it's worth it & forces me to improve that aspect if I can.

Found time to pick my creature sculpts back up: Some people asked me to do a screen-cap previously, so for this one I did. 2x 35 min videos at 20x speed for anyone with the patience. Modelling/ Painting, Render & Post:

Awesome ! You strictly sub-d model ? Not that it's relevant, I'm just being nosey.

Thanks guys, I'm looking forward to doing the next one sooner. @grain - It's something I would like to do, it depends because most of the scultping I have been doing on my £300 laptop - just doing the high detail stage & render at home on my proper workstation - this little machine is at it's limits with what I am asking of it & the screen resolution is tiny, so I actually think it couldn't cope with screencap as well. But when I get a chance to do one from home on the proper PC, I will record a screencap, I hope.

I should call these 'occasionals' rather than weeklies ! As ever, Cinema 4D, Octane, Photoshop. Week 5: Chuul, tried some more moody lighting for this one & more gloss.

Right, back on track: Week 4: Carbuncle. 4 Short Evenings, 2 Long evenings, Cinema 4D, Octane, Photoshop

Thanks for the comments, guys. @eenendertig - cool ! never seen those before, they look great, I love all the dirt in their materials. @rectro - It is there, just didn't seem so spectacular, I do find the SSS a little fiddley in Octane at times. No doubt this last one isn't quite as good, dropping it in the middle then picking it back up never helps I find. But this excerise is about just moving onto the next one.

Oh dear ! My weeklies kind of crashed & burned ! Working away from home during the week on a new job & having to work off my crappy cheap laptop. I'll try & pick the pace back up again, might have to stick to poly-modelling during the week, then sculpt & render at the weekend. Anyway, here is: Week 3: Stirge. 4 Short Evenings, 2 Long evenings, Cinema 4D, Octane, Photoshop

Thanks Guys ! @Robididan , those are awesome ! never seen them before. I would need to do another few passes of detail + texture painting & materials to bring them up to that standard. For now, that's not the aim but I may come back later & re-visit a couple that deserve more development

Looks great already. I've always wanted to try the hair feathers but not got round to it.