HeavyGear LAC wip

Hey Folks,

I got into a new Table top miniature game, its called "Heavy Gear" and its really cool, that is if you are into table top miniature games. ANyWays.

I haven't done much in the way of Hard surface models so I figured I make something from the Heavy Gear game. I tend to get side tracked so I figured I'd mix the game into work and keep the flow going. I made an assault rifle used by one of the units in the game. Its called a Light Auto Cannon, and its the main weapon of a Heavy Gear a Giant 15ft tall walking humanoid tank. The model was built using a tiny 1 inch long model from the miniature so it took a bit interpretation to make it.

Modeled in Max 2010, rendered in mental ray with just a basic shader and 5 lights.

Still working on lighting and getting good Depth Of Field effects. but its just a WIP so it has a long way to go yet. hope you like it.

Displacment maps

OK so I figured out why I was getting the strange distortion on the lips. It turns out in zbrush if you have "double" active in the display properties panel, when you export your mesh to an OBJ it makes a copy of the mesh with the normals flipped in teh exact same place as your mesh. when you apply any maps it sets it to both sides. so I figured that out and things got much easier.

I started trying to use MentalRay and I got some results that were decent. I slapped in some blank eyes so he doesn't look as creepy... ok still looks creepy but I'm not worried about that right now.

This image he still has that waxy plastic texture.

This image I started testing out MR photometric lighting. things look a little better in this one.

More fun with Zbrush Displacement maps

He still needs eyes but I got the displacement maps to work rather nicely.













Different angle

Yaay! progress... sort of.

I've been trying to get a good shader setup for rendering sculpts I make in Zbrush For a while now. and for a while now, I have been avoiding it. sevaral months passes and I had no real progress. but now I have some minor progress and I'm very happy about it. So far any attempts to use UVmaps I make have failed and pathetically I might add. Seam lines and all sorts of tragic errors. after much mucking about with my own UVs I decided to use AUVtiles that Zbrush generates, just to see. Well they worked. I was both happy and annoied about this. becase AUVtiles are not the way to go about this sort of thing and it means that my UVs were just set up wrong my error. and Happy becase at least I had some results.


I am using Max2010 with Mental Ray and Max2009 with Vray. here are the results.

Render from Zbrush as a reference:

Render in Max 2010:









you can see that the details on the face transferred over pretty good with the exception of the Lips and ear where some sort of Clipping happened. I think the mess on the lip has to do with the fact that the mouth-sock is an open edge and it displaced through to the other side on the lip. Its times like this I feel so lost but I remember I'm a super n00b **sigh**

OK I just crashed my system with a setting that was too much for my machine. which brings me to the settings I used.
I found several tutorials on this and I combined a few and got this set up.
for max2010. I applied first a Turbosmooth then a displace modifier.

Something to note! i just realized I had this set to Editable Mesh and not Editable Poly. that will alter the results I have a feeling.

Here are my settings for anyone who reads this and for my own log of how I didz-it.

Starting with
TurboSmooth Modifier:
1. Render Iters. mine is set to 6 I'd be careful with this because I set mine to 8 and my whole system crashed I started at 3 and moved up from there, this setting affects render times.
next up
Displacement Modifier:
2.Strength, I just bumped it up by one click. I noticed that depending on scale and units different values appear here.
3. Luminance Center, Zbrush as you know sets 0 displace at 50% grey and Max sets it at 100% black. This needs to be checked off and center needs to be 0.5. (apparently you can change the way that zbrsuh exports your displacement now in 3.5r2 but I have messed with it.)
4. Map, plug in your displacement map from Zbrush here.
5. Use Existing Mapping this will use your AUVtiles or UVmaps.

well that is what I used try it see what you get.

V Ray

Just installed Vray and its giving me a headache! I can't get the lights to work, or the cameras or just about anything except the materials. and only in pre set up scenes. sigh. *bangshead* I'll get it working soon.

Its been a few weeks.

Its been a few weeks and sadly I don't have anything to show for it. I've been trying to learn a few tricks in MAX and kicking around in Zbrush but no images worth posting. I'm working on my portfolio website, with any luck I'll have that up soon and I post a link for it but for now. also nothing... wow totally unproductive month... sigh.

"Grange" update

Here is a an up date to "Kurtis Grange" the the first thing that I did was take the surprised look off his face. the second thing was that the cheeks seemed a little too gaunt in the first effort. any comments are always welcome.


These are the different passes composited together to make the above image. I didn't do any photoshop work on it, other than to balance the layers, alto I probably should do some touch ups. The first 3 passes, have a color map.
Basic Material, Flat color, Sketch Shade4(3.5 mat),Jellybean,Toy plastic


Here Grange looks a bit too surprised, I had to tone that down a bit.