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.

Wasn't referring to your muscle setup. Was talking about the first snap shot of you alien model.

Good luck though.

James

Thanks for the incite, I'll keep dropping in to see how it all goes

Cheers
Jay

Thanks for the support guys!

magget78

Yep. I know all about displacement maps but I'm not going to use them on this character. One thing I'm experimenting with is using Zbrush to make a displacement map for the alien that I will use as a bump map. So far it's working well. I don't like using Zbrush's bump map viewer texture.......

My alien is about 30,000 polys. That really isn't that much for a full character. I'll probably apply a Smooth when I render too.

Very impressive rig. I'd like to have a go at muscle systems too, but I think it would just crush my computer.
How do you imagine the texture for your alien to look? (if you plan to texture it)
And some kind of personal question, don't need to answer it if you don't like. Are you a clay modeler for profession and making cg ones is kind of a "hobby" or the other way round? And what is your preffered medium?

so many questions...

one or the other way, great models :bow:

farbtopf,

The muscles do take a while to calculate when you first hook them up. It took my AMD64 3000 with 1 gig of ram over a half hour to connect the muscles to the skin but now that it's done, I can move the model around quickly and the muscles move too.

The texture will be kind of light. I don't want a lot of wrinkles and bumps on this one. From 10 feet away the character will probably look pretty smooth but up close it will show a soft leathery texture. I have another creature that is very heavily textured. I used displacement maps on that one but I don't want to show it right now. Maybe later...

I use to sculpt with clay professionally but mostly it has just been something I do here and there when people want me to make something for them. I worked on the Jurassic Park ride for Universal Studios and also a few robotic displays that are in Vegas and Atlantic City.... I love clay but I also love the limitless quality of CGI. Funny thing is that the alien I'm making with Maya is taking about as long as it would take to make with clay and molds and cable controls and all that jazz.

I don't think of CGI as a hobby. It's more like a quest. I want to be able to offer low budget film makers a place to go to get hyper-realistic creatures at a price they can afford. I also want to use CGI characters in a movie that I plan on producing later this year. The alien I'm making is 1 of 3 creatures that will be in a 10 minute short that I'm shooting now. There will also be 2 spaceships and a couple of fun effects. Thanks for asking!

thanks a lot for your detailed answers. Wow Jurassic park! I loved it when i was a child.
Sounds very interesting what you are planing to do. I'm looking forward to see your models in action.
10 minutes short sounds like a lot of work. I've been working on a 2 minute animation for the past two months, so i guess i can get the picture of what 10 minutes mean.

Good luck with your film, (would be interesting to see a storyboard or animatic if you have :)

cheers

farbtopf,
I want to see your 2 minute animation when you're done!

I'm really keeping the story and the storyboards under wraps because I think people will enjoy the movie more if they don't already know what's going on or what they are going to see. I decided to show the making of the alien model but I'm not going to be showing his ship or the other creatures. Ooops. I've already said too much ;)

Don't forget; I want to see your animation as soon as it's done!

So do I when you're finished
I guess I can show it to you somehow. My deadline is the 27th so it has to be ready for next thursday.
Before I disapoint anyone it is not all done in maya. I don't have the computing power nor the knowledge to do that. It's basically lots of hand animation and other stuff, composited together and the 3d had to come in to solve some shots that would have been impossible without, -to add some subtle "magic";)

thanks for asking for it!

The muscle system's looking very nice, have you got it to a point that you could post a pic of the influence of the muscles?

Love to see it if you have.

gster123 ,
I promise to post some rendering once I get everything working. Right now the muscles are working and they are indeed influencing the skin but there is some wrinkling and bunching going on that I have to smooth out.

It's hard to resist the urge to have all the muscles jiggling and bouncing around. It looks cool but it doesn't look real. Once you tune everything in the way they should be, the effect becomes very subtle and in some areas, practically unnoticable. It's starting to look good in the chest area. When I raise the model's arm, the chest muscles and the shoulder muscles and the back muscles all slide under the skin and cause it to deform.

Here is a shot of the completed muscle rig.


http://www.morphicmotion.com/alien/muscle8.jpg

Hi,

finished my animation. But I can't compress it enough to be able to post it, well I could but it get's tiny and you'd need a magnifying glass to watch. Unfortunately I don't have a website either, so if you want to see it I'd have to email it to your conatact adress on your website.

good luck with your alien
cheers

Here's an update.

I've been spending some time learning how to use the cMuscle system. I like the way it works but I'm still figuring out the techniques of using it. In other words; I'm still making mistakes. Anyway, here are a couple of new pictures.

cMuscle has its own skin node with skin weighting, sliding, jiggle and a few other useful features.
http://www.morphicmotion.com/alien/poseskin.jpg

The muscles stretch and contract as the joints bend. The skin slides over muscles or, if you want, you can make the skin stick to the muscles so that if the muscles jiggle, the skin will follow even if contact is not made between the skin and muscle... You can also add a fat layer if you want..

http://www.morphicmotion.com/alien/posemuscle.jpg

There are some more pictures and poses on my site. Feel free to check them out! As usual, all comments and criticisms are welcome.

wow! Really cool work velusion. Well done mate.:beer:

The only thing that I am not sure about is the bump texture - It looks a little patchy in places. For example the upper arm looks bumpy, but the lower arm looks smooth. I am sure that this is somewhat intentional as you stated earlier on, but I just think that the transition from bumpy to smooth needs a bit of work.

Great website by the way.

arran,
Thank pal! I appreciate it...

I'm sorry. I guess I should have mentioned that the skin color and bump map were just thrown on for the rendering so we wouldn't have to look at gray skin. I've started working on the actual bump map but I haven't even started painting the model yet.

I'm struggling a bit with the creases in the pit of the elbow and also behind the knee. I thin the problem is with the way I modeled those areas. All in all; I'm having a blast with this character!!!

Yeah - it's been really good to follow your progress. I am definitely interested in the cMuscle system - it looks pretty cool.

Looking forward to seeing your animation.:beer:

james,

is it possible for you to put a movie of cmuscle at work?

im interested in it a little. can you put blendshapes on top of the muscle rig?
can you put muscles only on selective areas?

thanks.

Vlad,

Here is the website for the muscle plug in: Comet LLC
If you go there you will find videos that show the muscles in action. They have a nice little demo video set up that shows a dinosaur with no muslces then after the muscles were installed. Wow! what a difference!

To answer your questions:

Yes. You can use blendshapes and all of Maya's deformers on top of the cmuscle skin node.

You can use as many or as few muscles as you want... Actually, you don't have to use any muscles at all. You could choose to just use the skin sliding feature or the jiggling or skin wrinkles. The skin not is very dynamic!

One other thing; after you set up your animation with a character that uses cMuscles, you can play it and render it on another computer by simply installing the free cMuscle "player".

There is a demo version of cMuscle available at their website! It limits what you can do but it does work and it does come with the complete users manual. Check it out...

The thing about muscles is that it is tempting to have the muscles really bulge or jiggle just so you can clearly see them working but I think that for more realistic results, the muslces have to be set up to act like real muscles. That means that they don't usually move enough to be very noticable. They are there and they are working but they are subtle... It's a very subtle effect. The main reason I decided to use the muscles is because I wanted to make sure that my models have chest and back muscles that move when the character lifts its arms. Like I said; I have made a few mistakes with the alien model that I've shown you. If I had to do this one again, I would have modeled its chest smooth then added the muscles to give it shape rather than modeling the muscle shapes right into the model's geometry.

I'll be doing an animation test soon. It should show the muscles in action. Especially around the shoulders, chest and back areas...

Thanks for the support and interest, guys..
:beer:

lookin real sweet m8!
I too would love to see the animation test. :attn:

I worked a few hours on the animation today. This test is going to be about 20 seconds long. I'll post it soon.

nice model,go ahead :)

Here is the first animation test for the alien model. It is kind of short so don't blink or you will miss it.

animation test

The purpose for this test was just to make sure that the model, muscles and rigging were all working. They seem to be although the test pointed out a couple of areas that I want to refine a bit more.

Now it's time for me to begin painted the model as well as modeling its teeth......

love the animation ..made me bust out laughing this morning at work ...keep up good work


also velusion

your picture of the cat sitting like that ..I actually have a cat that sits like that ..never seen it before and seen your pic and was like wow there are two of the sillie boogers