Making Of 'Rhinos & Terminators'

Introduction

Hello, this is Taehoon oh, I'm a senior artist working for one of the best game developing companies in California, US, and this is my private work, Rhino and Terminators. I'm so pleased that I'm going to be sharing my skills and giving some tips to 3dtotal users.

I'm a big fan of the Warhammer 40k series, but I'm more interested in the concept and painting, I'm not that good at tactical stuff.

I spent more than six months on this project. I mostly used Maya for the modelling and rendered with Mental ray. So now I would like to share with you all about how it was created. I' ll explain with 3 different parts, making the model, textures and composing the scene.

Concept & Reference

I found most of my reference from magazines and the Internet. I discovered that there are many different styles and colors of Rhino tank, but I chose the Ultramarine blue color and the simplest shape for modeling. For the character I chose the Terminators like you can see below. The main reason why is that I thought this character is the coolest from Warhammer 40k series. However, it wasn't easy to define the head shape in 3D.

Reference for the Rhino's

Reference for the Rhino's

Reference for the Rhino's

Reference for the Terminators

Modelling

I started polygon modelling from the side tracing and extruding. I used Boolean tool often, even though I don't trust the Maya one but it worked fine.

The Armor

The armor was the most exciting part to model. I created simple shapes, like cylinders, tubes, boxes and even hexagons as a modelling tool. Even these simple default poly models have UV maps too. So I could change the scale and placed them wherever I wanted.

Characters

I have mostly used Maya's smooth proxy modelling tool. I learned to use this CPS tool a long time ago and now I just love to use it. This time, the smooth proxy modelling tool was really helpful for making nice curved shapes for the armor and the skull.

The Terminator's Head

The head of terminator was a really fun part for me. I didn't use many polygons when making it so it's very economical. The head is a little different from the original one, I like the more stylized and cartoon looking one, so I made the shape more round and cute.

Environment Props

To make a exciting and interesting warfare scene, I chose these demolished walls and columns. To add to this I tried to make simple rock shapes using "rockGen" Mel script. I'll explain how to make the rocks below. I have also added some rubble and tires are among the other props for the scenes.

How to make a simple Rock

This is the tutorial about how to make a simple rock using "rockGen" Mel script.

Mel script download

http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/misc/3368.html
http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/misc/1540.html

Swordmaster_ebook

Swordmaster_ebook

Step 1

Download the Rock Generator mel script.

Step 2

Now create some boulders and rocks, make sure you make them a good shap

Step 3

Click on the a chamfer vertex option and then soften / harden the edges to 15

Step 4

Do Automatic Mapping for the UV

Step 6

Now make a simple rock texture and layout the UV

Step 7

A little extra bit that you can do. Make ramp and sampler info and create a contour around the rock.

Step 8

The final sample

UV Layout and Textures

I have taken a screen shot of the textures below. Each material has a colour, bump, specular and a simple cosine power map.

Making the UV layout and creating the textures, was the most difficult part as it took a few months to produce. I have baked the shadow maps and I've also rendered occlusion maps and brought both to the colour map.

First three textures sizes are 3096 by 3096, and the others are mostly 1024 by 1024, I've painted highlight lines on every single hard-edged part of the texture. In addition to my game texture skills, I have overlayed a lot of UV's to save the UV space and to work more effectively.

Lighting and Rendering

In the scene, I've used a very simple, three light set. They are the Fill light, Spot light and Rim light. The Fill light is for a low ambient light. I've used the Spot light from the top to use as the moonlight and the Rim light I've used as the background's city light. I have used some volume lights to emulate the street fires around the tank. Having volume lights can be very useful for controlling the falloff effect.

Composition

After rendering the scene in Mental ray, I managed to get several separate renderings of the image like colour (diffuse), occlusion, specular, bump, subsurface scattering (SSS) and shadow. After gathering these images, I took them all into Photoshop and did some composition to find the best looking. I'll explain about how to composite below.

How to compose your scene

Fig 22

Fig 22

Final Composite

Fig 23

Fig 23

Noise layer - simple black & white noise filter 1%

Fig 24

Fig 24

Depth Layer from Render Layer*

Fig 25

Fig 25

Reflection from the render layer**

*We use this as a Depth of field effect. Bring this layer to the alpha and select using ctrl - left click and g. Blur and inverse the selection and unsharpen the mask. (this is the very last process)

**Change the material mute and reflection to 0.50. Check the raytracing option and use the HDRI image for the reflection image with Big Sphere.

Fig 26

Fig 26

Specular from the render is easy to pick out

Fig 27

Fig 27

Render layer occlusion is different from shadow

Fig 28

Fig 28

Diffuse from render layer*

Fig 29

Fig 29

Shadow from the render layer**

*Try to make this layer brighter and saturated

**You can use raytracing for the shadows or depthmap shadows

Subsurface scattering (SSS) (fake) from the render layer, you can assign "miss_fast_skin_maya" materiel (see bottom). It works really well with an organic model.

This is a very simple layer to set up for compositing. It's not the perfect answer but you can get the idea from this layer set.

Look at the image carefully and try out different ways until you getr what you want to express.

Now I'm going to show you how to get the occlusion, SSS, diffuse, shadow, spec, reflection and the depth map from the render layers.

1. Switch to the render layer from the display layer set.
2. Select the objects and the lights and hit the new layer button.

3. Right click on the layer and go to presets and choose what you need to render. (You can render the Depth, Occlussion, Depth map, Diffuse map, Diffuse, Spec and the Shadows).




4. To render the Subsurface scattering pass, you can choose "create new material override" and "Miss_fast_skin_maya" shade.

5. However, the more important thing is how to set up the lights. I use a simple three light set (Fill, Spot and Rim) but, a different light setup will always give you a different feeling. Experiment with your creativity.

Background image and fire reference

I gathered several pictures of industrial building and within Photoshop, made these industrial images my city background. For the fire references I have used some pictures I found of an iron mill.

Final Result

Here is the final result.

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