Alien project
 

I'm working on an alien model that will be part of a short film that I'm making.
http://www.morphicmotion.com/alien/a4.jpg

There are more pictures here

Right now I'm working on the rig. I'm determined to make the feet work correctly on this model. My last one had "wooden feet".

Cool looking alien! Hope to see it finnished.:beer:

Looks cool, nice ZB work to:)

Im working on some aliens too:D

Keep it up:beer:

Thanks guys!

I really like Zbrush for stretching the model around but I still lay out the edge loops in Maya so I can keep control over the way they move across the surface.

One thing I'm doing with Zbrush is creating a displacement map that I'm going to use as a bump map. I've had bad luck making bump maps in Zbrush. They never look anything like the way they do in Zbrush but, I've found that a displacement map from Zbrush is very accurate as a bump map. My model is about 20,000 polys but the Zbrush model I used for displacement was almost 5 million. All I did was use the high poly model to create skin texture. No major deformations.

I plan on making a bunch of blend targets for the head along with some clusters on the face. The body will use a traditional skeleton with a really cool muscle system from cMuscle. The muscle system is worth the $250 I had to spend to buy it.

I've give some more details on the skeleton and muscles and everything else pretty soon. One thing I can say about the skeleton is that I sed a broken heirarchy set up on the neck joint located right at the base of the skull. I'll explain more later but the broken heirarchy allows you to bend the models neck in all directions while its head stays level and has no rotation unless you turn on the orient constraint that you can set up then turn off until you need it.

nice man.
altho the anatomy is a bit questionable. but since its your design you get a break. :p

i would still make some major changes to the low rez in maya before diving into zb. this way u have a good base to start with.

Vlad, Please explain more. I like when people point out things tht I probably missed.

I kind of misrepresented my workflow with the pictures I posted under the above link. The low res model as shown in the picture wasn't taken directly into Zbrush. I added more edge loops and spaced them out and also did some modeling in Maya with the Artisan tools before heading off into the wonderful world of Z.

I think the elbow joints on the model could have used some more work but I think I can live with them. If not, I'll remodel them sometime during animation tests..

i mean, block out the meash a little better.
add more geometry in region where you will need them most.
because subdividing in ZB is not like smoothing in maya or subDs in maya.
if you have more geometry nin the head, thats the area where most of the details will go, so in ZB, u wont be shooting yourself in the foot by needing to subdivide the mesh to some crazy poly count.
and i would also work on the anatomy; again define better area such as fingers elbow, shoulder, clavicle, hips, knee toes. these are area that will get fustraing and geometry intensive if you end up doing them in ZB.
im doing some ZB work myself atm, and im taking a lot of careful preliminary steps to not have trouble down the road.

:beer:

Hey Velusion - cool looking alien. Looking forward to seeing some more progress on this one. Well done mate!
:beer:

Very nice alien, fu**Üöfds impressive work on your website. Admire your clay models. I'm doing some clay motion animation at the moment can you email me some skill please;)

great work!!!!!

Latest update:

I've pretty much finished the rig and now I'm working on the muscles. Here's a picture of the muscles in progress.
http://www.morphicmotion.com/alien/muscle1.jpg

There are more pictures on my website too!

Nice work dude ;) i just don´t like so mush the concept.

wow and i thought my rig was complex :eek:

I've always wondered about muscle systems in maya, especially when you see how they set up all the characters in major feature films. So i have to ask, how did you set them up? are they essentially pieces of geometry used as influence objects or is there some plugin that i'm oblivious to?

It's looking good to a certain extent. You may want to lighten up on the poly count. Have you learned Disp. maps or normal maps yet. They're a big benefit when it comes to fine detailing with low geometry?

Keep up the good work.

Hey Velusion

Nice to see something fresh. Is that the muscleTK plugin and how do you find working with it?

Cheers
Jay

Thanks Guys!!

Rostoons,
I'm using the cMuscle system. It uses NURBS muscles with a proprietary skin deformer that allows you to not only do muscles that stretch and squash but also you can get the skin to slide over the muscles or bones. It has jiggle settings and a bunch of ofher stuff. Best $250 I ever spent.

Magget 78,
The muscles are NURBS, not polys so they are very light. There really is no reason to consdier displacement maps or anything like that since the muscles are under the skin and don't require any real detail..

Jay,
I took a look at muscleTK but the cMuscle system looked better to me so I went with it. The first thing I did was print out instructions which took some time since it doesn't come with a printable manual. The instructions are in HTML format so I had to go to each page and print it seperately. Over all, the system is pretty easy to use. It allows you to mirror bind weights and muscles too which saves a lot of time.