Nasty biomech beasty

[jim c]

Here's something I've been working on off and on. Started off as an experiment in ZBrush and has completely escalated out of control.

A turntable of the sculpt, no textures

The sculpt with some basic textures,

Stills from houdini :

A turntable with some simple animation (done in messiah), rendered in Houdini.

Question: the last still shows lights in the grill like structure. How would I make those show as beams of light that fire upwards into the haze (like a flashlight that has it's "beam" when it flashs through smoke)? Would you just make a tube or something, convert it to a volume, and them light the volume? Or is there an easier way?

[jim c]

Made an environment for this guy. Modeled in Modo, detailed in ZBrush, and now rendered in Houdini. Post in AE. Render done in Micropoly for the beauty pass, and raytrace for the two fog passes (one for the "room volume" fog, and another for the floor fog).

Any C&C on the room renders would be most appreciated. It looks sort of like a good videogame, but too realistic.

Edited May 23, 2012 by jim c

[jim c]

Here's some updates - a final render of the beasty in a turntable.

I used 2 takes, one for a a beauty pass (PBR) without the fog, and another for the fog, using matte shading for everything but the fog. The fog was simmed using the dry ice preset as a starting point. Fog mat was the Billowy Smoke preset.

Materials were based on the standard Mantra Surface mat, with the biomech body material using some custom bits - added a "de-gamma" node to get the color map to look right, and added texture map driver for spec intensity.

I'd really love to hear what people thing - does the fog look good enough? Personally it seems a bit "flat", not volumetric enough? Is there a better way to light it?

[jim c]

So here's another variation on the whole biomechanical creature idea. Here's the final zbrush design:

Did a first round of texturing yesterday, and got it rendered today. Rendered with PBR and also took a stab at experimenting with SSS. Any C&C would be great.

[jim c]

Couple more updates, more work on the SSS part of the shader. I adjusted the shader so that I can feed control the SSS intensity with a texture map. It feels like I'm just putting in random numbers in the SSS section - I wish I understood more of what was going on here. The attenuation density seems to be particularly mystifying to me, even after reading the docs.

[jim c]

After redoing all the textures on this guy, and rebuilding the rig in Houdini, here's a render with PBR. Sample settings aren't quite right yet, but it's a start.

[kleer001]

In regards to your 02 September 2012 smoke question. Yes, it looks flat and cottony. Try upping the density and the shadow density on your shader, increasing the dissipation, increasing the emission density, and lowering the grid size in your sim. That way you'll have more detail to work with. You'll also want to play with the other settings in the Shape tab such as Distubance and Turbulence.