CG Regault Thread

[Rodavan]

Mechmaster - Yup it's Sketch & Toon , been icthing to work with it again, but it's very expensive , luckly I have a friend with a copy and he lets me play every once in a while.

I love Cinema4D's rendering , much easier than Maya to get good results , but when it comes to modeling ...... Rhino & Solid Edge rocks.

Not finished with the model there is still 2 types I need to finish , when finished ,I want to finish my VF-1 for big battle scene and I have been asked to do a animation of the regult walking , a nice challange

I think some modellers would think my techniques are way to cumbersome , I come from a CAD background in the automotive industry where every detail is important , therefore my model are way to big and difficult to animate.

My next project to educate myself is a dinosuar with poly's ( I have a thing for paleontology )

If you want , I could do a few screen caps of how I did the back door and post them .

Edited May 13, 2005 by Rodavan

[Mechmaster]

I'm looking forward to seeing your battle scenes then and with the reverse articulation on the Regult legs I can see that animating it will be a challenge.

I suspect that many of my models are just as 'cumbersome' as yours as I am a totaly over-the-top detail nut and I am sure most professionals would be appalled by my self-taught working practices but its result that count and though I may go the long way round I'm usually moderately happy with the results I get.

I'm quite fond of dinosaurs myself, it was far more of an obsession when I was a kid but has been nudged into second place by anime over the last couple of decades. The pride of my collection was an 8 inch chunk of fossil rib-bone almost as thick as my wrist but I seem to have misplaced it sometime in recent years. Sadly my organic modelling skills are nowhere near good enough to attempt a CG dino, no Jurassic Park from me then.

If its no trouble then I would certainly like to see some shots of how you did the Regult hatch, I have tried to get similar effects myself in the past, playing around with weighted hyper-nurbs and such but my efforts really sucked and I reverted to other methods. Anything you can show me will be greatly appreciated and may well lead to an improvement in my own work.

[Rodavan]

More images

[Rodavan]

and of course the "Toy look-alike"

[cobywan]

Those are amazing. It's a great time to be a ZentranFan on the boards these days.

[Goshawk]

sweet. Those look awsome. keep up the great work

[DatterBoy]

Beauty, ROD. Love that lighting. You should seriously composite this and post in the toy forum and see what fishes bite. Find a good showroom pic with some space and throw it down there as a 1/60 or 1/48 sized toy.

:Dat

[Knight26]

those are sweet beyond belief, I want one, lol

[chrono]

Ok stop being a renderwhore cause your making me look bad!

Seriously though where you gonna finish the feet?

[Rodavan]

Thanks guys

@ DAT - I 'll see what I can do

@ chrono - Busy with them , post something later .

@ Mechmaster - I done a quick backdoor tut , never doen this before so , let me know if this what what you needed . I went first the CAD(Rhino) route , not sure if you have cad tools available so here goes nothing ...

1. I finalised the shape of the body first, with the positioning of the side “exhausts” and the guns in front.

2. Then drew the curves that show the shapes I want in the door.

3. Boolean the main body to get main body shape .

Inset picture is a curvature analysis

[Rodavan]

Backdoor tut 2

1. Project door shape curve onto back of main body

2. Cut the main body with the projected curve.

[Rodavan]

backdoor tut 3

1. Use the backdoor surface (blue) to create 2 offset surface , make sure the offset is big enough to stick out , using Solid Edge I created a thin wall solid ( see next picture).

2. Once the offset surfaces is created run a ruled surface between the outside ( Red & Green)

[Rodavan]

Backdoor tut 5

1. The picture shows a thin walled solid which I cut in half to show how the “door” is going through the back of the main body.

2. I also “stitched” the offset and the ruled surfaces to create a solid green door.

Edited May 18, 2005 by Rodavan

[Rodavan]

Closer look

[Rodavan]

Backdoor tut 6

1. Now use the backdoor solid and main body solid and create Booleans

2. Red shows the door subtracted from the main body.

3. The cyan shows a Boolean using intersection to leave us with a door that fits snugly.

I'll stop now ----This took about 15 min of modeling time , is this what you had in mind Mechmaster , please let me know , I don’t want to boar everybody to sleep

[Mechmaster]

I'll stop now ----This took about 15 min of modeling time ,  is this what you had in mind Mechmaster , please let me know , I don’t want to boar everybody to sleep 

Thats great Rod, it will help me loads, you make it sound straightforward enough but I'm not sure I would have figured it out on my own, many thanks. I'm gonna go dig out my battlepod model and give it a try and don't worry about boring everyone, I'm learning here. Thanks again.

[Mechmaster]

I've restarted work on my own battlepod but I didn't feel up to doing anything too complicated today so I settled for building a couple of optional accessory parts.

Small missile launcher...

[Mechmaster]

Big missile launcher...

[Rodavan]

excellent work Mechmaster

And you wanted modeling tips from me ?......

What did you use for refrence ?

Edited May 20, 2005 by Rodavan

[chrono]

Pretty good Mechmaster.

Now go the extra couple yards and add a slightly bevel to the larger edges, especially the area where the 'T' connects to the pods.

[Mechmaster]

Rod... no matter how good I might think I am, I am always keen to learn new tricks from people who have spotted something I have missed. Reference for the small pods was Arii's 1/100 kit and box-art and Nichimo's 1/200 kit and box-art, refs for the big pods was Nichimo 1/200 kit and box-art. Plus a couple of not too clear pics in the This Is Animation Macross books. As the references were not terribly good and in some cases totally contradictory there is also an element of artistic license so these should be considered Ver. Mechmaster.

Chrono... nearly all the external angles on these puppies do have a small 45° bevel, the internal angle which you mention, between the pods and the support arm, is in fact one of the few edges I didn't bevel, mainly because I built the pods as seperate objects so I could use the same support arm for both sets, rather than building everything as a single connected mesh. Expect to see a bevel on that junction next time I post pics of these, as for the other edges, do you think I was too subtle with the bevelling?

The pic shows a close-up of the mesh for the small pod, I do try to avoid sharp 90° angles when I can, especially on larger parts.

[chrono]

Thanks for the close-up wireframe Mechmaster. That helps clarify things. What threw me was the lighting. Generally avoid this type of viewing angle because it washs out the details very easly. Try to angle the light for the best contrast, unless your using a GI dome(which is better showing off WIP details).

I should've said chamfer not bevel, my mistake! Chamfering catchs the light better then a single bevel. Still's good!

[Mechmaster]

I should've said chamfer not bevel, my mistake! Chamfering catchs the light better then a single bevel. Still's good!

Er... now you're confusing me, surely a chamfer and a bevel are the same thing. I'm guessing you mean fillet, a multi step rounding rather than a single step.

You're right about the lighting though, its not one of my strong points and for quick pics like these I generally just chuck in a single, distant, parallel light source with a dim omni light opposite it to relieve the shadows.

[Rodavan]

If you haven't been to the model kit section yet , I asked for advise on weathering and decided to do something different

[EXO]

bastid! I knew it!!!

I should edit my post there to keep it going. I'm surpised no one has asked what kit it is...

Edited May 23, 2005 by >EXO<

[DatterBoy]

I think ROD actually had some people going once in the toy thread with his old Glaug. I'd love to pull off a prank like that with my models just to show Kensei and Godzilla that their collections aren't that big.... Line up some fake shelves with some fake CG valks... 20LV's (since I don't even have one)...

Rod.. if you have a good pic of some empty toy expo floor space where we can composite.. I say we pull a really well executed fast one on the Toy threads.

:Dat

[Mechmaster]

Since we are talking about faking up CG models to look like real kits, how about this?

[mechaninac]

That looks so fake...no one's work bench is THAT clean.

All joking aside, that's pretty good; not entirely convincing as a realistic fake-out (for some reason, almost all CG comes across as artificial; it's not something you can really explain cogently, but more of an overall feeling you get when you look at something CG...the human eye and brain are extremely hard to fool).

[Rodavan]

Very cool - Mechmaster

I like that desktop.It's very difficult to get any CG to fool the human eye , it's all about light . I have a collection of different lighting rigs for Cinem4D that I've been using if you want to play with them let me know -mechmaster

The "Camo" Regult was done with only Radiosity and a whitespace lighting rig , I still want to a HDRI render

If anybody has a good hi res picture of a work area or shelve they think we can use , let me know , I would like to give it bash.

[Mechmaster]

That looks so fake...no one's work bench is THAT clean. 

Mine certainly isn't, I'm thinking of running the belt-sander over it to clean it up a bit.

I agree the texture on the bench really does need improving, this pic is one I did when I last upgraded my CG app, my first experiment with radiosity and I didn't put much effort into the bench texture, I have an old wooden tabletop which I am planning to photograph for a new texture. I also think the boxes need a bit more work, I do have quite a few in my collection which look as new as those but I really do feel that something a little more worn and dented would add to the realism.

I think we spot CG more readilly because we work with it ourselves, I don't think the average person would spot it so easilly (then again I tend to think that the average man in the street couldn't find their own ass with both hands and explicit written instructions so perhaps I am underestimating the ability of Joe Average) certainly one friend to whom I showed this picture needed a little convinvcing before he would believe that it was fake.

Can you imagine the response if I had produced a picture like that with, say, a 1/48 resin destroid or a 1/24 VF1 and posted it in the Model Kits section, I bet it would have got a few bites at least.

Rod... heres a photo of my workbench,the original is 4048x3040, if you think you can use it let me know.

Edited May 26, 2005 by Mechmaster

[mechaninac]

Mechmaster, how'd you make the parts on the sprues? Did you have them scanned, or model everything yourself? They look very legit from an engineering point of view.

Rod, you're absolutely right, the proper lighting is crucial in selling the image (at least about 75% of what makes or breaks a shot); it is what defines the mood and volume of a scene. No matter how amazingly detailed and thought out your model is from a technical point of view, if the lighting is not up to the task of creating the proper real world atmosphere and weight, then the resulting render is just so much CG eye candy. The other two critical things are the environment in which the model is placed along with it's composition therein, and how perfect the model is...very few things in real life a flawless, so the more perfect a model looks the more fake it appears.

Edited May 28, 2005 by mechaninac

[Mechmaster]

Mechmaster, how'd you make the parts on the sprues? Did you have them scanned, or model everything yourself? They look very legit from an engineering point of view.

The Gundam Typhoon model is one of a number I created for some friends doing a Gundam Wing fanfic. For this picture I deconstructed my original CG model, breaking the parts down in a manner suited to a real kit. I used actual kits from Bandai's 1/144 Gundam Wing range as reference for the sprue layout and also modeled the particular polycap sprue supplied with that range of models. I flattened out one of the box trays and scanned it to get the card texture for the box as well as scanning a few bits of the box lid for the barcode and text. The original models were posed and rendered for the box-art, including cel-shaded renders for the images of other kits in the 'series' on the side of the box lid. I even produced bump-maps in katakana for the labelling on the sprues but I didn't go so far as to add numbers to the part identification tabs beside each piece... maybe next time

[chrono]

Rodavan & others interested.

Recently I was doing some internet research on how to go about making PS2 Tranformers: Armada textures. I've pretty much figured out alot of the basics, but needed my indepth pointers and well found this not so little treasure trove of PROFESSIONAL texturing points on using and making textures.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=77484

[Rodavan]

Thanks Chrono , very good reading

[Rodavan]

Trying more camo ....