Year 3 - Character Renders/Posing Practice
Introduction
This page will serve to showcase character renders I have produced in 3D software I use for animation (Autodesk Maya and Blender 2.8). As I want to improve my posing and rendering abilities, I will be documenting my progress on this page. I am also using this as an oppertunity to get more adjusted with Autodesk Maya, after spending more time animating in Blender during my previous year on this course. All rigs used on this page will have links to their respective owners and are being used for educational purposes only.
Posing and Render Practice (Himiko Toga, Blender 2.8) - 04/11/19
Today I upgraded to Blender 2.8 and wanted to learn how to make rain; I found a tutorial on YouTube that I followed closely, but was unable to get the exact results. I was able to simulate the rain successfully, however I was unable to get any splashs animations for the rain hitting the floor.
Tutorial I followed to achieve rain simulation in Blender.
After I finished with the rain simulation, I wanted to place a chracter in the scene and make a few renders. I found a rig of Himiko Toga on Deviantart (link to rig), downloaded, and began posing her in the scene. I was surprised to find a feature called 'Auto IK' that helps with posing a character rig by applying automatic IK to the rig in Pose Mode. This made it much easier to work with this character rig - the only issues I had with the rig was that there was no hip bone to
Following this tutorial, I was able to learn more about particle systems in Blender 2.8, as well as how to use the Shader Editor to blueprint textures and other nodes together in order to manipulate the texture in the viewport. I also learnt how to add a HDRI environment texture.
The Cycles render was used to render out these images. There's a lot wrong with these renders in all honesty, they're all grainy which is probably due to lighting issues or the HDRI image; the HDRI environment texture is only in 1K, so the background appears very low resolution. I don't mind how the rain looks, being my first time simulating rain, however there is an area in the first render where too much rain is in one location - making it look a little messy. I'm happy with how the lighting and shading looks on the character rig.
The HDRI environment texture used in the above renders has a resolution of 1K. For future renders, I plan to use an environment texture with a resolution of 4K or higher to avoid low resolution backgrounds.
Posing and Render Practice (Breath of the Wild 2 Zelda, Maya)- 08/11/19
The previous night (07/11/19), I discovered a series of The Legend of Zelda rigs created by Christoph Schoch (artstation) (gumroad), available for download on his Gumroad page.
I had initially tried to import the .fbx files of 'Breath of the Wild 2' Zelda into Blender, but the program wasn't cooperating - leaving the rig in a mess when Pose Mode was enabled; the bones were also not working correctly. I quickly abandoned Blender and moved over to Maya. I initially had trouble adjusting back to Maya's controls but was able to get used to them after a short while. I wanted to begin animating straight away, but decided to take it slow and practice posing in Maya before animating. This was to get used to the camera controls again, as well as the shortcuts.
Breath of the Wild 2 Zelda by Christoph Schoch, available: here
While posing, I had some issues with Maya spontaniously crashing for reasons I'm unaware of - maybe I pressed something too quickly or too many times without realising. I had an initial pose I was rather happy with when Maya crashed once, luckily it took so long to close that I was able to grab a screenshot before it dissapeared - so I was able to use that as reference when Maya was open again. I checked the auto save file to see if I could salvage anything, unfortunately the file was empty.
To the left is the initial pose I had before Maya crashed. During this stage, the fingers hadn't been posed, neither had Zelda's face. I had started playing around with lights, changing an 'Ambient Light' to give it an orange hue. In order to achieve Zelda's arm pose, I used a reference image found on Google Images, featureing multiple artworks of Zelda from varying titles. I chose to do a similar pose to her 'Breath of the Wild' artwork.
(Pictured, right: Early render of pose in Maya. Pictured left: Reference image used during posing).
Breath of the Wild 2's story is said to have a darker setting compared to the first BotW game, due to this, I attempted to give Zelda a more 'tired' or 'longful' expression in her pose. I also attempted to have dim lighting, which is why I chose an orange hue to resemble a fireside.
After reloading Maya I got back to reposing Zelda. With help from my previous pose render for reference, I was able to get her posed relatively quickly. Zelda's fingers probably took the longest to pose, as they aren't rigged to bend completely with one transform, rather I had to select each controller and manually pose them. Not a massive issue, although it would have gone a lot quicker if this wasn't the case.
I spent a lot of time adjusting Zelda's face to obtain the expression I was looking for. I had some issues finding how to manipulate her eyes, as they seemingly didn't have any controllers to close them. I found that I can enable the 'skel_layer' at the bottom right of Maya to show the skeletal bone layer in the viewport. With this I was able to select bones and move her eyelids to close them slightly.
(Right: eyes before and after posing).
In the preview renders for this rig, Zelda is posed with props, however I couldn't find where these props were. The bones for the props are visible on the skeleton, but not in the viewport. If I'm able to find a way to unhide them, I will use them in future renders; the bottom right in Maya (where I can hide the mesh, controllers etc. - first picture on the right) there isn't an option for the props.
Final Renders
Whilst rendering, I experimented with different light intensities; I also found my renders being saved were darker than what was shown in the render output. Searching on Google, I found out that I needed to check 'Colour Managed Image' instead of 'Raw Image' before saving the render image. This saved the image without darkening the colours. I kept a hold to the darker renders as they bring contrast to the image set.
Overall I am pleased with how these renders look, for the backdrop I used a cube with a few of it's faces deleted. I changed the viewport lighting to 'Two Sided Lighting' to have the lighting in the render work. Without this selected, the inside of the cube becomes pitch black; this also effects Zelda's hair in the same way.
Continued Pose + Render practice (BotW 2 Zelda, Maya) 08/11/19
During this session, I wanted to recreate one of Zelda's poses from Super Smash Brothers Ultimate when she summons a suit of armour to attack.
To the right is a reference image for comparison. In my pose I chose to make Zelda more intimidating by: lowering her eyebrows; keeping her eyes relativily the same as they were in previous renders; adding a purple light above her; and angling the camera to a lower position.
In the second render onwards, I posed her cape and hair to give the sense of wind flowing around her. The thrid render features a full body shot from above.
I'm please in how these renders turned out, though I would like to learn proper lighting techniques in Maya and move to using the Arnold renderer, rather than Hardware 2.0. I would also like to start using some staging in my renders, rather than have solid colour backgrounds.
The backgrounds in these renders were achieved by using a cube with some faces deleted; viewport lighting was set to 'Two Way Lighting'. I do like how the yellow and orange looks together, though stated previously, I would like to start staging for future renders.
After rendering I took the images into Paint Tool Sai and used the Water Brush tool on any rugged edges in the background in order to blend them better into the image. For the final render in this batch, I extended the orange at the bottom to the bottom right of the image.
