Behind The Scenes: Sagittarius(1)

Fox Renderfarm, a powerful but affordable maya render farm, brings you a sharing of behind-the-scenes of Sagittarius made by Maya from 3D artist Zihao Zhou. This article introduces how to use the animation CG model production process to restore a 2D original painting Sagittarius, and tells the whole creative process, especially sharing some special places' processing methods and skills.

This artwork contains many elements in the early stage, so it is necessary to consider clearly in the planning of the early stage of production, otherwise it will affect the later model production. Zhou divides the whole work into several parts,

1. Character skin: human head, body, horse and monster head.
2. Equipment: protagonist equipment, wings and soldier equipment.
3. Building

Scene construction

Construct the entire scene with simple geometric objects, and make some adjustments after determining the position of the camera lens, and try to place all the objects as well as possible. The location of the light can also be tested to find the most suitable place. It is necessary to make some model objects in ZBrush and put them into the scene as soon as possible to enrich the scene. Don't pay too much attention to the lights and details.

When everything is there, you can start making more accurate models to replace things in the scene. During the construction process, gradually adjust the shape or the position of the wrong part. In the production of this scene, I used to separate the equipment into separate Maya and ZBrush for production. There are two main reasons for this.

1. There are many symmetrical objects in the equipment (although it will definitely break the symmetry later), but the previous symmetry can be improved efficiency (making high-precision models directly in the scene will be inconvenient) .
2. Do it separately in each Maya file. It can save some time for testing the material effect later, you can put the main scene lights into a single Maya equipment in the file, you can increase the speed of rendering. Of course, in the end, the scene effect in the lens shall prevail.

Sculpture

In this step, you can sculpt the protagonist's face, muscles and monster head (except for the symmetrical sculpture of muscle, human face and monster face, which is convenient for making the overall effect, and then break the symmetry later), the muscle part uses an existing body. Use the mask and move tool in ZBrush to adjust the desired appearance, and put it in the scene to match the position of the body. The head of the protagonist and the head of the monster are also placed in the placeholder model before the scene is replaced. The horse's body also needs to be sculpted with muscles, but it will be covered with a large area of hair in the later period, so the sculpting need not be too detailed.

Refine equipment

Equipment is produced separately. When this large piece of equipment is determined, the next important thing is the pattern on the body, and there have been many versions of this pattern. In the production process, depends on the topology pattern of the equipment. Here I use Maya's own topology tool to first select the model to be adsorbed, click the magnetite, and then click quad draw to draw on the model.

Then add a line in the middle of the drawn shape, and put the added line in the direction of the normal (to turn off the suction command) so that the pattern is there, then only need to extrude the thickness, pay attention to the corners wiring.

In addition to a larger pattern, some small patterns attached to the surface of the equipment are needed to enrich it. This level is actually to find some suitable black and white pictures of the pattern on the Internet for stitching to make a continuous square picture, and then expand the equipment. UV, stick the pattern to the position corresponding to UV.

Then paste the black and white pattern into the ZBrush replacement channel (need to flip the V direction), adjust the extrusion height, and take a look at the effect. Of course, the patterns on the equipment can be stitched using some online pattern materials.

The production of the armor part is more troublesome, because the shoulder armor looks like a broken metal effect, so first make the shoulder armor large, and then use the ZBrush grouping to divide the shoulder armor into multiple groups, and rewire the regrouped part. The effect of broken metal can appear. Of course, it is still necessary to manually adjust the gap between each piece of metal. By default, the gap size is the same, which is not good-looking.

Wings can first find a wing and place it to see the effect, and then replace it with your own wings.