Random Fun

Here's some random fun. I've already got the rigging done, I gotta fix some of the fingers, but it's done, I'll post Work in Progress on that next.

Eyeball Theory

Traditionally, eyes are rendered with the iris concave(inset). This allows for the jewel effect you get when light is shined in one direction you see more light on the opposite side of the iris. Giving a sense of depth.


And any casual close observation of the eye viewed from the side shows that the Cornea bends the view of the iris out, giving a unique effect that adds depth realism and identification to the rendered eye.



I wanted to see if I could trick a 3D model of an eye into the same effect without any dynamic lighting.



I was able to using a simple raytrace object for the cornea to bend the view of the iris to give that interesting effect. For the reflection I tried my best to give a sense of the seneray and of course the tell tale all important highlight. Which interestingly is just a texture and not dynamic. It took a while to get that to work properly but I think it adds something unique that most people wouldn't go to and a feel that hearkens to video game nostaligia without explicitly duplicating the video game rendering methods.

Hope you think it looks cool!

APZ Modeling Complete!

The Modeling and texture skinning phase is complete. It took longer than I expected but I think the final product is worth the lack of sleep it took to produce! Here's the chronology that led to it's completion and a bit of fun thrown in for laughs.

Beginning Texture Work

Unwrapping and skinning APZ. Ya know... Like Silence of the Lambs... sort of...





This is the very beginning of it, so the texture will be even prettier/color justified later.

edit: Next Day Progress

Nothing big enough for a new post but it's getting more exciting!

Visual Concept

MY VISUAL CONCEPT

is to NOT have ANY lighting. Which for anything 3D is extremely unusual and almost besides the point, and THAT'S exactly why I'm going to do it!

But, it's not without a basis. Kingdom Hearts in game graphics are 3D and yet there is no lighting or shadows whatsoever, the shadows for the character are painted onto the model directly.



A side effects is that lighting is not dynamic and no matter how you rotate a limb or the whole character the shadows and highlights are stuck. Which seems to make it a closer relative to classical animation than the usual 3D approach. AND!!! That's why I'm doing it. With the added bonus of the fact that this IS NOT a common technique, and this distinction will give my short a different feels than if I used dynamic lightning.

PROOF OF CONCEPT

I got into a very small internet community (of about 8 thousand people-ish) who play the 1998 PC version of Final Fantasy VII, and mod it with custom models and textures, etc. So I set across to make my own version of the main character and to my surprise was a HUGE hit for some reason.

I hate to brag and stuff, but this is the results of that project, which has been downloaded over 2000 times. This was the first time I ever made a full character and skinned him from the ground up, it was a very informative learning experience.

My goal for that project was to build the main character up from scratch and visually sort of reconcile that character's various portrayals into one form. The character Cloud was originally an anime character, and then he's been portrayed realistically, so I wanted to include the attributes and details of all of this and see what it looks like blended together.





In order for a model to appear correctly in the game, it actually needed to have the textures with the lightning and shadows painted onto the model just like Kingdom Hearts because of the obsolete nature of the ancient game programming.

This model I built COMPLETELY from scratch and I painted the textures myself, and the shadows onto it. You can see by looking at the texture file that I even painted the shiny reflective metal parts onto the model

Model Progress

Here's the progress.