HomeSlice Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 Hi, Here are pictures of some of the pieces I've been working on for a project I'm doing reconstructing the east pediment of the Parthenon in Athens. I'm so greatful I got a shot at a project like this. In addition to improving my art skills immesurably, it has stretched my skill and understanding of Animation Master way beyond what they were before I started this. Holmes Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 2, 2004 Author Posted January 2, 2004 And another... These models hold a personal interest for me too, so critiques are really appreciated. And if you know these sculptures and see some glaring mistake I've done please tell me. I may not be able to fix it for this job because the timeline is sorta tight, but for my personal interest, I'd like to go back to these and get them as accurate as I can. Sometimes is was difficult to model a particular perspective because I just couldn't find a good picture of that particular angle. Holmes Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 2, 2004 Author Posted January 2, 2004 Last one I'm posting... promise Holmes Quote
DarkLimit Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 HomeSlice - dude I can't find words to speak.. this is amazing work..... these are well done. the stone detail is nice.... it's very artistic..... you going to texture them? keep up the awsome work..... Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 2, 2004 Author Posted January 2, 2004 wow, thanks! The client wants to texture them if there's time. I have to finish the East Pediment and do the central scene of the West Pediment by April 1st. That's alot of modeling, something like 13 more models in three months. The book I'm doing these for will be published in black and white, so color isn't so important. Thanks again for the comments, Holmes Quote
Dearmad Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 Dude. Please, you MUST do something for me. Register over at CGchannel and then POST these suckers LARGE over there in the finished gallery/3d section- SHOW them that AM can do this kinda stuff! if these models don't make frontpage over there, NOTHING deserves to make front page! Go here and register and POST! http://www.cgtalk.com/ Make a rukus on over there amongst the lightwavers and 3dmaxers. Now, wireframes please? Quote
Iham Wrong Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 Man that looks Greek to me! Spare no splines! Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted January 2, 2004 Hash Fellow Posted January 2, 2004 Very impressive. How much of the drapery is mapping and how much is geometry? Either way looks challenging. Quote
natess44 Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 They look awsome! I was wondering how you did the cloth too. Quote
Kricket Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 Wow that's some really really nice stuff! Can you post some shaded-wireframes? Would like to see how much is geometry and how much is bump maps and stuff. Quote
zacktaich Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 Beautiful stuff, It would be awesome to see those on cgtalk. I would love to see these w/ a background and textures Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 2, 2004 Author Posted January 2, 2004 Here are wireframes of the two most cloth intensive pieces. I struggled mightily to find a solution for the cloth. My criteria were 1) It must look good rendered at @1200 pixels 2) the folds- at least the major folds- had to match the reference photos Very Closely. 3) When Arctic Pigs rises from the dead I plan to show these suckers in all their 3D glory on the web, so they had to be rotatable(ie-no billboards) 4) I must be able to finish a figure in a week or under I came to the conclusion that Less Is More. My first models had huge numbers of splines because I was trying to model nearly all of the folds and creases. I was really getting bogged down in Muscle Mode hell when trying to pose them, and I wasn't getting the accuracy that was required. The biggest challenge is that I can't just have folds that look believable, they have to match what survives of the original sculpture, so after posing the models, I have to do quite a bit of work in muscle mode. The solution I found is to use Fewer Splines, not more, and (for the most part) just hit the major contours and anything that's noticable when turning the model. Then I open my reference pictures and very meticulously cut out little pieces and stamp the pieces on the corresponding section of the model in an ACTION window. How small the individual decal is depends on the curvature of the model section. I rarely have pictures taken from straight views. I will have one picture that is mostly from the front and a little from the left at 1.4 meters above the floor and then I will have one that is mostly of the back and shows a little of the left at 2 meters above the floor. And I have to reconcile these two different perspectives and figure out what shape the dang thing really is. The same object can look very very different from two not-so-different perspectives. So I go through the reference pictures looking for surfaces that appear to be perpendicular to the camera. Then I cut them out and make an alpha mask. I feather the alpha 8 or 16 pixels depending on the resolution of the photo, then I manually repaint the black areas of the alpha because they aren't alway pure black and I was getting some ugly lines from poorly masked decals. Then I rotate the model to approximate the angle from which the particular photo was taken, hide everything but the patches I want to apply the decal to AND the adjacent patches surrounding (for smooth blending of all the decals), and Stamp it with a color decal at 100%. I don't flatten the model. Often I'll have to open the UV editor and adjust points so the decals blend together more or less. When I have the entire model stamped, I open each map in Photoshop and run a High Pass filter on it so it is mostly gray with white highlights, then I paint/blur/smudge the map to accent the highlights and smooth out irregularities and artifacts. Then I save this as _bump. Then I "add image" to the corresponding decal. I add this image twice, one as a bump map usually set around 300% or 400% and once as a displacement, usually set at 100%. Then I turn the original color map down to 20%. Its a good thing I didn't have to worry about rendering at higher resolutions because I used a ton of maps and I couldn't find very many hi rez pictures of the right angles to get my textures from. If I want to print these larger, I'll have to do a bit of painting of the maps in Photoshop. Quote
zacktaich Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 That's awesome. What would be REALLY awesome is if you animated them some. Quote
Zaryin Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 These are amazing! I agree with others when say say you should post these at CGTalk. These will grab attention. Quote
Dalemation Posted January 2, 2004 Posted January 2, 2004 There is some incredibly impressive stuff being done in AM at the moment and, Homeslice, your work is right up there. Thanks for posting the very detailed account of how you solved the cloth. It looks fantastic and has made me realise I should be doing certain things differently in my own modeling. Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted January 3, 2004 Hash Fellow Posted January 3, 2004 Clever process. I'm surprised it yields effective bump maps, but obviously it does. Quote
mediaho Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 I have nothing new to add. I'm just speechless. Amazing, brilliant work. Quote
xor Posted January 3, 2004 Posted January 3, 2004 C'mon Homeslice. Admit to it that those are real statues and you just took a purple crayon to them to fake the wireframes. Dang if those aren't some of the best models I've seen in quite some time. You've apparently spent some time with these. Not just one, but several. The texturing just adds so much to them as well. I am in awe!! Thanks for sharing. Are these created for a specific project, or just because you could? Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 4, 2004 Author Posted January 4, 2004 The purple crayon trick sure would have saved me alot of time if I had thought of it :-) Just to show what a half textured model looks like. Here are a couple of views of the one I'm working on right now. I still have 4 or 5 more hours to go creating all the color stamps adn adjusting them. Then several more hours converting all my color stamps to bump/displacement maps and adding them and adjusting things and making a MILLION little tweaks here and there.... Oh, to answer you question xor, I'm doing these for a book about Greek art and religion. Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 4, 2004 Author Posted January 4, 2004 Here's another view. Thanks for all the comments everyone. It's such a boost when fellow artists whom you respect really like your work. Quote
JohnArtbox Posted January 5, 2004 Posted January 5, 2004 HOMESLICE! HOMESLICE! HOMESLICE! ) These are fantastic. It's an amazing project but if I can ask, why do you need the 3d images, is it to show an angle you can't photograph? Look forward to more. Quote
nixie Posted January 6, 2004 Posted January 6, 2004 good question, I was thinking the very same thing! such a challenge, but the results are truly amazing! awe inspiring stuff! Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 6, 2004 Author Posted January 6, 2004 I can only guess at why the author wants these done in 3D. I think during all the hours he spent researching the subject, he was dreaming about what these sculptures looked like restored in full 3D, so when he realized it could be done, he went for it. He has plans to have me do the entire Parthenon and all the sculptures, metopes, friezes and murals. I think he wants to give his readers an idea of what it was really like to, for example, approach the entrance and look up at the east pediment in the early morning light as one is walking up the steps. He wants to bring the subject to life. What *I* think would be cool is to allow people to rotate these models on screen to see what they looked like from all angles. Those crazy Greek artists sculpted amazing detail in areas they must have known would never be seen, and it is not so easy to find good pictures from too many angles. regretably, I had to guess quite often about what some aspect looked like because I didn't have any photos that showed it. It was a little frustrating because I know there are some people who have easy access to that information, they can just walk over and look at the original sculpture, or one of the plaster casts that have been done. I would love to have the budget to fly over to the museum in Switzerland that has plaster copies of all the existing sculpture and have every sculpture photographed to MY specifications so I would have some great rotoscopes and texture sources to work with. The thought gives me goose bumps Quote
Mike Lium Posted January 6, 2004 Posted January 6, 2004 OMG ! Those are just unreal im speechless. WOW! Quote
John Keates Posted January 9, 2004 Posted January 9, 2004 Wow! these are realy impresive! I havn't seen such detail on an AM model before. The displacement map feature is getting quite an outing recently. It is hard to give you a crit without the origionals. If I am going to be realy picky though, there is something perhaps not quite right about the shoulders on the last two, but then they might be like that on the statues. Congrats on a job well done though, I am blown away! Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 9, 2004 Author Posted January 9, 2004 Hi John, Thanks for the comment. Do you mean the shoulders on the woman with the horses, and the two women sitting? Now that you mention it, the right shoulder on the woman with the horses does look too rounded or something. Is that what you mean? I didn't see that before :-) If I have time, I would like to fix that now. What is it about the shoulders on the two women sitting? The shoulders, or at least the arms, on most of the statues have been broken off, so that is a gray area that I can "adjust". Holmes Quote
John Keates Posted January 9, 2004 Posted January 9, 2004 Yes, It is the roundedness of the shoulders that I was looking at in both cases (the ones that you mention). Maybe look at some anatomy drawings. There should be a slight pointedness to the shoulder where the bone is. Maybe they are a little large also. It is hard to say as females were often done in a rounded and "big boned" kind of way. If you look at the woman with the hourses, her arm is maybe a little far from her body. It is difficult to say exactly what it is that I am seing here. It is pretty subtle, but I guess that you are going for perfection. Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 9, 2004 Author Posted January 9, 2004 Thanks John. Sure, why not go for perfection? Who knows, maybe one day I'll hit it. I've already replaced the head of the reclining figure from the first picture I posted because it looked too pouty and the fix was just too elusive for me, so I just replaced the whole head. Quote
ypoissant Posted January 12, 2004 Posted January 12, 2004 Holmes, Those models are absolutely amazing. I can feel the work involved in splining the models but I can't imagine the monk job of doing and positionning the displacement maps. Excellent work. Quote
sculptorpro Posted January 24, 2004 Posted January 24, 2004 Wonderful and inspiring work, Holmes. Can I ask you what happens when you use a displacement map in conjunction with a bump map that is on a shaped spline, does the displacement map create new mesh? Would this be a good technique for skin on a face. Thanks Quote
Zaryin Posted January 24, 2004 Posted January 24, 2004 sculptorpro: As far as I know the displacement function only affects the models at rendertime, and does not create a totally new mesh of the model. I could be wrong though, and am not that conversant with displacement. Quote
HomeSlice Posted January 24, 2004 Author Posted January 24, 2004 Hash's implimentation of Displacement is a bit of a mystery to me. It doesn't generate any more splines or patches, but when I crank up my realtime viewing resolution to Variable, the displacement shows.... and also slows my realtime view down to something like 2 seconds per frame (as opposed to "frames per second" lol) Using both displacement and bump maps is a great way to get needed detail while cutting down on patch count. A displacement map will adjust the general contour of an area. The bump maps add the little details. When I want more depth or contour in an area, I add more splines. The more splines I have in an area, the more contour a displacement map will provide. BEWARE though! Displacement maps look Really Ugly on 5 point patches. I mean, unacceptably ugly. So you have to devise ways to work around that inconvenience. Displacement MATERIALS on the other hand, don't seem to mind how many or how few patches I'm using. When I can get away with using a material instead of a map I do because a disp. material is so much more effective. Procedural materials are still a challenge for me though. It takes time and alot of experimentation for me to get something I like, and I still don't have a lot of control over that particulars of the material. Quote
Admin Rodney Posted January 25, 2004 Admin Posted January 25, 2004 sculptorpro: As far as I know the displacement function only affects the models at rendertime, and does not create a totally new mesh of the model. I could be wrong though, and am not that conversant with displacement. Not quite correct... ;o) The way to get a new (displaced) mesh/model using displacement is to save/export the file out of AM. Steps - Export the model with deform applied into an .ava (avatar) file. - Import the .ava file - Save back out as .mdl file Now you have the deformed mesh. When I first discovered this I had wondered what the purpose of the .ava files were. You may be able to do this another way but this way works for me. Rodney Quote
Zaryin Posted January 25, 2004 Posted January 25, 2004 Man this might work well for a porject I'm working on. Thanks for the info. Quote
ZPiDER Posted January 29, 2004 Posted January 29, 2004 woah .. beautiful! i'm speechless. thanks ken for updating the news page, i would have missed these awesome pics! Quote
Admin Rodney Posted January 30, 2004 Admin Posted January 30, 2004 Since I didn't say it the first time around. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I want to see the final product and how it's used (Please) Rodney Quote
mooncaine Posted January 30, 2004 Posted January 30, 2004 I'm just .... awed. Incredible. I was going to ask you about 5-point patches; I see you've already mentioned that. I feel almost ashamed to offer a critique -- this is really fine work -- but you asked, so I will simply say that you might want to revisit the joints of some of the models -- elbows, ankles, shoulders, and wrists -- and adjust them further. Occasionally I see joints that suffer a bit from the same problems most of us seem to encounter with spline models. Joints seem just a bit too much like pipes or tubes that are crimping a bit. I'll PM you a link to an image that shows some examples of what I mean. Your Greek statues are so good I'm gonna lose sleep just thinking about all this! Quote
Pyro Posted January 30, 2004 Posted January 30, 2004 these are the best models I have seen in RF by far. Keep up the good work. Quote
JBarrett Posted February 1, 2004 Posted February 1, 2004 Wow! Amazing work! Just....just......GAH! I'm stunned! Uber-kudos to you, sir! Quote
KenH Posted February 1, 2004 Posted February 1, 2004 I just want to echo the support....your skill and patience are God-sent! Quote
bentothemax Posted July 10, 2005 Posted July 10, 2005 Wow, i missed this when it first hit, but those are amazing! Really nice work! Ben Quote
Paul Forwood Posted July 11, 2005 Posted July 11, 2005 Wow!!! I missed this too! Homeslice, you landed yourself a wonderful project and you are sure getting impressive results! These images remind me a little of the 'Pieta' image that someone posted on CG Talk some time ago. I agree, go and shake up those forums and stretch some of the narrow minds over there. Superb!!! Quote
nerrazzi Posted August 3, 2005 Posted August 3, 2005 This is insane! This technique would look good on those LOTR statues. Excellent work man! Love what you've done! Quote
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.