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A continuation of my previous article, this particular feature will focus on my second graduate piece the Character Bust.

(You can visit my Graduate image gallery by clicking the menu link or the link supplied in this article.)

The character bust, probably the most technically challenging piece I had worked on prior to graduation. I actually started out wanting to render everything into several passes and compositing it into a final bust, I was able to accomplish this, but at the expense of my sanity (side note, I am now sane again). I learned a great deal about compositing during this endeavor and was working on limited resources to achieve the final output as our computer systems at the time were relatively slow and lacked the necessary resources to read in a series of large files.

The character started out by exporting all the necessary elements needed for establishing a good rule of thumb render point. All displacement and other tessellation options were first initialized prior to doing any sort of render layer or render pass breakdown. This would help when actually texturing and rendering the bust as it provided a means for me to optimize the geometry to a point where it was quick to render and was setup accurately to the zbrush displacement. Another benefit to doing this is to weed out any possible tessellation errors from geometry that was not cleaned properly.

Once that had been setup it was time to move on to the texturing aspect which at the time I had utilized a zbrush plugin to project the image of a face on the head and output variations of the texture and stitch them together to create a single uniform seamless image. To clean up seams the head was placed into BodyPaint, which also helped with areas of large color variation.

Once all that had been completed I perfected the shaders to work inside the ideal of post composite work. Changing the skin shader so it was non screen composite and planning out the other necessary shaders to create a complete breakdown of all lighting. Diffuse, indirect, specular, reflection, subsurface, hair. Each lighting pass was initially broken down into individual Key, fill, etc. Probably not the most efficient method to get the product done but worked at the time.

Hair, was not a happy moment in this project, the machines we had available to use at our fingertips were incapable of rendering a sequence of images out without running into some major memory bottlenecks so I had to go back to the drawing board several times in order to compromise the density and look of hair in order to get it to render properly. I was able to finally come to a compromise about the look but still had a few frames that needed to be finessed. (Probably should have use Shave and a Haircut instead of Maya hair)

The eyes were a combination of SSS and mia material. The blending of the two helped to provide a nice light scatter on the sclera and provide the necessary realism.

When all passes were output I utilized Nuke to composite the final sequence of images. Other than preparing the correct merge methods for individual passes adjusting the final output for aesthetics was the major challenge.

Uv remapping was utilized for the bust in order to adjust color info for adding makeup and color saturation, value and hue. Custom maps were created and input using the remap as well.

But, that is the bust in a nutshell, a project I thoroughly enjoyed.

Model Credit : Joel Durham

Captain America: Super Soldier pre-rendered CG Trailer for the game, I loved this project, our team was very dedicated to make this even better than Thor. The only downside was since we had made transitions for rendering we were working off less brute force rendering. Scenes had to be perfect first time which provided a complication since our tools had broken and caused complications when setting up render scenes, it was like digging through a haystack for the issue.

My main role was character shader development, environment shading and lighting and character lighting. I had so much fun working on these characters. I also was a primary gateway for verifying asset work from UV work to Texturing to ensure a smooth transition to shader development.

During downtime I had been given the soldiers to texture. I started with the Shotty character to establish the look that would work across all other soldier type characters. I worked on simultaneously shading the character as I finalized the textures. Once this was complete I oversaw additional texture work for soldier variations. Which included weapons or accessories.

From that point on I focused on shading all of the other characters, Captain America, Baron Von Strucker, Dugan, Bucky, Tank, Red Skull as well as the other characters you see in the Trailer.

Having that done I created the light rig for the wilderness environment including the fire light. Then shifted focus to the interior sequence with Red Skull, Strucker and Arnim Zola. I started by shading and lighting the environment setting it up for the camera shots. As soon as that was finished I integrated the characters and created their light rigs and rendered out the sequence for comp.

I really enjoyed working on this. It had come all together at E3 when I had a chance to see the work our team had been involved with on a big screen at the Sega booth.