New Statue (as replacement for old model)

[greebo]

I managed to get me motivated for some modeling, and tried out the most recent Blender 2.46 (not released yet, I took the release candidate), which adds support for normalmap baking and rendering of occlusion maps. I finally got around to replace that old "statue_open_hands" model of mine, and this is the result:

 

 

I only added a very faint occlusion map via a blend filter stage, which works well enough for this model. The model appears to have "baked" shadows on the diffusemap, but is still able to receive external lighting.

 

I've uploaded three sizes of this model, a decent set of skins is coming soon. Almost all stone textures work on this model, so I guess we'll end up with a dozen skins or more (similar to my gargoyle model).

 

@jdude: What size is your church in the release map? Is this model suitable/too large/too small?

[greebo]

Added some hammers, which fit in the hands of the statues (all four size variants):

 

[Tels]

Added some hammers, which fit in the hands of the statues (all four size variants):

 

 

Very nice - both statues and hammers

[Springheel]

It looks good. What's an occlusion map?

[greebo]

I'm not sure if this is the correct technical term, but that's what I called it. It is the result of a render pass, where the amount of occlusion is calculated for each pixel. For instance, the parts below the statue's hood or in the sleeves is more occluded than the chest. This is the result of the renderpass (I assume other 3D apps can do this just as fine):

 

 

The lighter parts are the more exposed ones. The "occlusion map" gets applied to the diffusemap of a model to darken the areas that are likely to be hidden from ambient lighting. It's some sort of "baked shadow", but here in this case I chose to use a blend filter stage to darken the areas of the diffusemap. This has the advantage of being able to swap the diffusemap and still keep the occlusion information and the advantage of the darkened areas still being responsive to lighting (it's not a real dark pixel in the diffusemap, the end result is determined by "diffuse + occlusion + lighting", not just "darkened diffuse + lighting").

 

Note that in the above case, I used a very faint occlusion map and it only makes sense for smaller areas in the UV map, but it is an improvement, imo.

[oDDity]

It looks a bit ancient and simplistic for a Builder statue. It's more like a 3000 year old pagan/celtic statue.

[greebo]

It looks a bit ancient and simplistic for a Builder statue. It's more like a 3000 year old pagan/celtic statue.

Yes, I agree that the statue looks old, but beware that this is only one of several skins that are available. There are smoother ones, but then again, the level of detail I put into the model is not very high, so it quickly starts to look blockish.

 

On a general note, I couldn't find a good way of modeling the fine details of a face or the fingers yet - I'm mostly using the sculpt tool, and that one is not my strength either. I haven't figured out yet how you guys are doing models like this (I assume it takes days and weeks to do that properly).

 

In fact, it boils down that I'm not patient enough of a modeler to whip up a decent model. My fault is that I don't put enough dedication into modeling and into improving my skills.

[oDDity]

A week to do that? No, more like 30 minutes by the look of it, though I haven't used blender sculpting tools. Maybe they're shit.

To do the finer details I assume you simply divide the model to a higher resolution and make the brush size smaller, unless blender sculpting is completely different from zbrush or mudbox.

[greebo]

30 minutes sound pretty impressive to me - even if it takes only two hours to model that head I would be impressed (just thinking about creating the textures that guy used). I'm moderately fast using the Blender tools by now, but I can imagine you can get really fast when you're using it for months and years.

 

I'll try to get to higher polycount for my sculpt model next time. One problem though on my end here is that Blender can get really lame when the polycount reaches 1 or 2 millions, that's why I usually avoid going as high as that.

 

Out of curiousity: How long did it take you to create that hipoly builder statue (the untextured one)?

[oDDity]

The detail on that head can't be more than a few hundred k anyway. You only need millions for a detailed full body.

I can't remember how long that took, it's too long ago, but a few hours I'd imagine. I just had a male base template which I would tweaak out and then add some clothing on top. It's just a poly model so there's no real detail on it.

[greebo]

Hm, maybe I'm using the Blender sculpt tool wrongly then. It always gets blocky (edgy polygons start to show) when I'm trying to operate using small sculpt brush sizes on a model with polycounts

 

I'm willing to believe that you can achieve results quite fast if you're mastering the tools the application provides, but I'm not quite there yet.

[oDDity]

Lol, well, I've just sculpted all 13 figures in Da Vinci's Last Supper in the last 3 weeks, none of them are more than 250,000 polys, and these all had to be lined up perfectly with the painting as well, as well as fitting in 3 animals sculpts for another project, so the better you become, the more quickly you can work, yes.

The trick is understanding the structure of the head, so you don't even need reference, and don't make any mistakes.

What makes novices take a long time is constantly having to adjust and correct their mistakes as they go, and tweak and tweak and do some more tweaking.

A professional just nails it straight away and calls it done.

You can see they are quite detailed for 200k each, so there's no way you need even that many just for that head you showed.

Maybe you should try a warez copy of mudbox or zbrush, because I haven't seen any good sculpts coming out of blender.

[greebo]

Lol, well, I've just sculpted all 13 figures in Da Vinci's Last Supper in the last 3 weeks, none of them are more than 250,000 polys

Yep, that looks good. I'm always impressed by the way the cloth is modeled on these characters.

 

What makes novices take a long time is constantly having to adjust and correct their mistakes as they go, and tweak and tweak and do some more tweaking. A professional just nails it straight away and calls it done.

This holds true for just about any art or skill, I guess. I can easily transfer this to coding or guitar, and I'm not a professional in either of these two.

 

You can see they are quite detailed for 200k each, so there's no way you need even that many just for that head you showed.

Do you ever reduce the polycount of a model throughout your workflow? I find myself adding subdivisions to models, which is increasing the polycount like crazy and I end up with a choppy framerate. Are you approaching the (say) 200k limit from the bottom, so to say?

 

Maybe you should try a warez copy of mudbox or zbrush, because I haven't seen any good sculpts coming out of blender.

Well, for my amateurish needs Blender is probably enough, judging from that modeled head I posted earlier. If I could even get near such a skill level, it would be more than enough. If that guy could do it in Blender, I should be able to as well.

[oDDity]

Yep, that looks good. I'm always impressed by the way the cloth is modeled on these characters.

This holds true for just about any art or skill, I guess. I can easily transfer this to coding or guitar, and I'm not a professional in either of these two.

Do you ever reduce the polycount of a model throughout your workflow? I find myself adding subdivisions to models, which is increasing the polycount like crazy and I end up with a choppy framerate. Are you approaching the (say) 200k limit from the bottom, so to say?

 

 

Well, for my amateurish needs Blender is probably enough, judging from that modeled head I posted earlier. If I could even get near such a skill level, it would be more than enough. If that guy could do it in Blender, I should be able to as well.

 

I don't know if you can just select areas of the mesh in blender where you need the most detail and just subdivide that part, but that's what you can do in the pro sculpting apps. It means you don't have to divide the whole mesh up just to put a bit of detail on the hair.

In mudbox, on my system I can handle 3 million smoothly, and in zbrush which is 2.5d ratehr than 3d, I can get 20 million quite smoothly.

Also in these apps is the ability to hide parts of the mesh except the bit you are working on, which also increases performance.

[greebo]

I don't know if you can just select areas of the mesh in blender where you need the most detail and just subdivide that part, but that's what you can do in the pro sculpting apps.

Yes, I guess I can do that. I can select a bunch of faces and subdivide them (using several modes) and if this is too tiresome I can also split my mesh into several meshes and apply the catmull clarke modifier on them. I haven't done this so far (mostly due to lazyness), but I could've thought of that nonetheless.

 

In mudbox, on my system I can handle 3 million smoothly, and in zbrush which is 2.5d ratehr than 3d, I can get 20 million quite smoothly.

Everything above 1 million is not very smooth in Blender, but this is with several levels of multires applied, so I guess the modifiers are dragging performance too. Also, I believe Blender is single-core, so it's not using my dual-core up to its potential.