Be Warned! If you are planning to use wrap deformers make sure to TICK the box that says “Render influence objects” in the advance settings. Otherwise you will find your low-poly object disappearing in thin air.. why on earth is this option unticked by default is beyond me, anyway if you need to hide the deform controller just do it in the attribute render stats..

tick this box!

Click for 720P hi-res!

work in progress shot of modelling, texturing and lighting of cloesups during the epic battle between Cerebus and the monster serpent! Big thanks to Semir the creator of Dodo Feather system for helping out with making the dynamic scales on the tentacle. Result is pretty spot on me thinks! Cerebus model and sword are by other artists in the whatcomix team. ( sorry can’t remember their names atm )

Here is a playblast of the tentacle in action complete with dynamic scales.

Ok, this was really hard to get the old head around, but this technique is mostly used in Games, but useful for what I’m doing at the moment.

Say you need to combine 2 different diffuse maps for a character that has a large UV island for a hi-res Texture and the other for low-res.
A good example would be a full character UV where the heads UV would need to have more space to use a 2K map, and the rest of the body just needed a 1K map.

In my case I needed a 4K texture map for one single tentacle and a 2K map for the rest of the serpent. ( see example below )

-1 to 1 UV space for multiple resolution textures

the darker tentacle has the 4K map

To achieve this requires that you move one portion of the UV to -1,0 and the one would remain on 0,1. to move the texture you need to;

• Create a layered texture node
• add the 2 textures
• make sure the first texture is using ‘over’
• make sure the textures “Default color” is black.
• in the place2dtexture node, change the translate frame to -1 , 0
• turn off any wrapping, stacking
• to see the updated result you have to change the view > image range in the UV editor menu to -1 on both minimum
• select the texture you want to preview, make sure its in the right place, as Maya will not preview the texture properly
• Do a test render, if all is well you should be able to see both textures on the model
• If you are getting any weird alphas check the default color and turn of alpha is luminance

Was banging my head for ages wondering why my render was coming out like this -

Turns out 32bit displacement maps DON”T like to be scaled when the object its mapped to is scales, so to fix this one must remember to adjust the Alpha Gain of the displacement texture, if you are increasing size, increase alpha gain and vise versa. Simply trick, but if you didn’t know it than nothing else you do will fix it.

Cerebus Under Attack! click for 720

Dodo Master Feather System

I succeeded in the proof of concept for using geometry scales on the outerside of the tentacle  using a great Maya script called Dodo Master Feather System made by Semir Saleh.
The script is a joy to use and works very well, here is the proof of concept video.

The scales will eventually be scaled down and multiplied to achieve the smooth effect, as this is only a test i didn’t want to waste too much time on processing.

Notes

• Using nurbs patches I manually covered the Poly geometry ( which has been rigged and skined, doing this avoids breaking things )
• Created a wrap deformer to the poly Geo
• Tested the rig to make sure everything was OK
• Modelled a single polygon scale, making sure to create the UV as well
• Applied Dodo Master to the Nurbs patch and adjusted settings as needed.

Mudbox to Maya IBL render

Next was to make sure I could generate various maps from the hi-res mudbox sculpt; textures were 2k and 4k in size and rendered with a HDR IBL

• Diffuse
• Ambient Occlusion
• Specular
• Gloss ( spec fall off  )
• Bump
• Vector Displacement

Everything but the vector displacement map was pretty easy to hook up to a Blinn shader network below.

Why vector displacement

• A lot faster to render ( by a factor of 2 – 3 )
• Not just limited to up and down displacement, which would provide a smoother deform.
• A ‘lot’ easier and faster to generate from mudbox.

The problem is that Mental Ray 2011 doesn’t support vector displacement maps! Seems crazy that something so good should be left out…
But thankfully to another great script by Wayne Robson – vector displace shader - DL I was able to hook up and use the vector displacement map no problems.

notes

• when extracting the vector displacement map from mudbox use either world, or object space tangents.
• add a mental ray subdivision approximate to the geomtry
• Connect Wayne’s shader to the Shading Group’s displacement input.

That’s it! Previously I have had major headaches with extracting and rendering standard displacement maps, but using VDM made things so much easier. The still render took only 1 min with IBL and Final Gather switched on to 256. Optimising pipelines FTW.

So for a little fun I comped the render in photoshop for some monster action! Cheesy I know, but what the heck

click for full size horror!