The last time I did anything with making CG hair was about a decade ago, and I did a terrible job back then, so I wanted to figure out how to make passable CG hair first because I saw the hair as basically a make-or-break problem for this entire project. With this plan in mind, the first problem I tackled was creating a completely new hairstyle for the character. The major changes I wanted to make to take the rig away from its default look were to add glasses, completely redo the hair, simplify the outfit, and shade the outfit completely differently from its default appearance. I figured that most of the other entries into the challenge were going to use the provided character in more or less its default configuration and look, so I decided that I’d try to take the rig further away from its default look and instead use the rig as a basis for a bit of a different character. I’ve gotten a lot busier recently with personal life stuff, so I knew I wasn’t going to have as much time to spend on this challenge, which meant I needed to come up with a relatively straightforward simple concept and carefully choose what aspects of the challenge I was going to focus on. One of the first things I discovered was that I had to scale down the rig’s mouth and teeth a bit just to bring things back into more normal proportions.Īfter playing with the rig for a few evenings, I started thinking about what I should make if I did enter the challenge after all. The model itself has a head that’s proportionally a bit on the large side, and the mouth is especially large, which is part of why the facial rig gets so creepy so fast. I think part of the problem is just the overall character design the rig is based on a young Natalie Portman’s character from the movie Léon: The Professional, and the character in that movie is… something of an unusual character, to say the least. I discovered really quickly that the Mathilda rig is reasonably flexible, but the flexibility meant that the rig can go off model really fast, and also the face can get really creepy really fast. I originally wasn’t planning on entering this challenge, but I downloaded the base assets anyway because I was curious about playing with the rigged character a bit. Unlike in previous challenges though, this time around Pixar also provided a rigged character in the form of the popular open-source Mathilda Rig, to be incorporated into the final entry somehow.Īlthough my day job involves rendering characters all of the time, I have really limited experience with working with characters in my personal projects, so I got to try some new stuff!Ĭonsidering that I my time spent on this project was far more limited than on previous RenderMan Art Challenges, and considering that I didn’t really know what I was doing with the character aspect, I’m pretty happy that my final entry won third place in the contest! This RenderMan Art Challenge followed the same format as usual: Pixar supplied some base models without any uvs, texturing, shading, lighting, etc, and participants had to start with the supplied base models and come up with a single final image. I wasn’t initially planning on participating this time around due to not having as much free time on my hands, but after taking a look at the provided assets for this challenge, I figured that it looked fun and that I could learn some new things, so why not?Īdmittedly participating in this challenge is why some technical content I had planned for this blog in the fall wound up being delayed, but in exchange, here’s another writeup of some fun CG art things I learned along the way! "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.Last fall, I participated in my third Pixar’s RenderMan Art Challenge, “Magic Shop”! Additional material is available from the Essential series website: You will gain access to the power of RenderMan, which has previously only been available to the elite of the Computer Graphics community! With plenty of illustrations and hands-on examples, Ian Stephenson: gives an overview of RenderMan.- explains how scenes are described.- illustrates (among other things) how to create surfaces colour lighting shadows and depth of field, using RIB and the C API.- introduces the techniques involved in creating and applying textures and shading. Essential RenderMan fast is a practical introduction to producing images using a RenderMan renderer, and getting the most from RenderMan. RenderMan is widely available and, with the demand for higher quality images, is now used by computer-based artists at all levels of the graphics industry. RenderMan has long been associated with top-end film production and is an essential tool for creating many of the effects and images in recent animated films (such as Final Fantasy, Monsters, Inc., Stuart Little, Pearl Harbour and Dinosaur).
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