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3DTotal: You must do a lot or research in order to get the right look to your textures. What sort of procedures do you do before you start painting?
James: Assuming I’ve modelled the character and I’m happy with the topology and the layout of the UV map, I start by rendering out front, side, back and top views of the phong shaded mesh with a very long lens camera. I can then load these into Photoshop and use them as a template onto which I can paint my textures. As I’m sure you can tell from a lot of my renders, I like to use photographic reference - in my opinion it’s the only way to quickly get realistic results! I’m a great believer in 3d.sk and also have a large selection of very high-resolution facial photography, which I use to cut and paste onto the rendered views, slowly building up the base skin texture. A good tip to get a nice base texture is to use a single photograph, paste it over the render and use Photoshop’s Liquify tool to soft deform the features so that they roughly match that of the mesh. Once I’ve roughly textured all views in Photoshop I project them back onto the mesh in LightWave and use Microwave to bake them into the UV map. This gives me a very
rough unwrapped base texture. At this point I like to spend a lot of time adding details and touching up
the skin, evening out tones and removing shadows. Only when the base skin texture is complete do I go
in and paint the details, like wrinkles, moles, fatty deposits, scars and so on. I also find it useful to bake out an unwrapped global illumination texture - it’s handy to have as a reference when painting in Photoshop as it allows you to easily pick out the major features of the face much more accurately than using a simple unwrapped wire frame.
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3DTotal: With the likes of programs such as ZBrush and Mudbox out today, how to you feel about the impact that these programs have had in the industry and have you ever been tempted to make the switch from LightWave?
James: This is a topic that comes up a lot at work; I’m a big fan of ZBrush and Mudbox and I’ve seen some amazing sculptures, by the likes of Kolby Jukes and Zac Petroc. However, the hobbyist 3D scene seems to be suffering severely from what I like to call the “lens flair effect”; i.e. as soon as every man and his dog realised that Photoshop could make sparkly bright lights subtlety went out the window, and very soon every student project and amateur film was bursting with the things. They were seen as a ‘quick fix’. This is kind of how I view a lot of the attitudes towards Zbrush at the moment; I see hundreds of indecipherably complicated creatures, all with huge frowning brows and folds of fat bulging out of every crevice. Don’t get me wrong, Zbrush sculpting is an amazing art form and I’ve seen some fantastic works created with it, but unlike a lot of people would have you believe, the CG industry doesn’t revolve around being a ZBrush modeller.
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I think this kind of attitude puts a lot of pressure on young people just getting into 3d to skip the basic stuff and delve head first into complex sculpting techniques. A good character modeller should understand anatomy and proportions first and foremost. A healthy understanding of topology and edge loops is also essential for an artist working professionally, especially in the games industry. ZBrush should be used as a tool to enhance a character to add details that wouldn’t normally be attainable in any other way. OK, rant over, sorry about that! I wouldn’t say that I would ever switch from LightWave to ZBrush because I’m always going to use LightWave to design characters, to model the base meshes, rough out shapes and design the topology. Only after that would I take a character into ZBrush to detail it, if I deem it necessary.
3DTotal: If you could sum up your style of work into one sentence, what would it be?
James: I would like to say “photorealistic character work”, but they’re not! |
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3DTotal: Throughout an artist’s career, they will always look at artwork by their favourite artists, whether
for research or for inspiration. So who do you find your inspiration from?
James: I have a huge reference drive: I tend to trawl through the forums downloading anything and everything that takes my fancy. My favourite artists are Zac Petroc, Francisco Cortina, Bay Raitt, Linda Bergkvist, Craig Mullins and Kolby Jukes, I guess I should mention Rich Wright one of my former bosses and a fantastic artist whom I learned pretty much everything I know about character modelling from.
3DTotal: Well it has been a pleasure talking with you and getting a little glimpse in to the life of James Busby. One last question before we wrap things up: what has been to most influential piece of
advice
that you have been given in your art career?
James: Thanks, it’s been a pleasure for me, too. Hmm, I’m not sure as I’ve only really been working for about 7 years now and I feel like I’ve learned so much and have been given so much great advice that it’s hard for me to pin down one specific thing... I guess I kind of live by the fairly depressing philosophy that you should never be happy with your work; there’s always room for improvement and the day you sit
down and look at a piece and say “that’s perfect”, is the day you stop trying. It’s not really advice but it’s what keeps me going!
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