We decided to watch the new movies hoping that would serve as a good digest for Evangelion. Suddenly, I found myself getting excited for Eva again. When I was a teenager I was inspired by the Christian-laden mythology and the psychobabble. After watching Evangelion 1.11 I’m more impressed with how they rebuilt the movie’s imagery. After watching so much anime it hadn’t really hit me just how far toon-shaded rendering had come. I could easily tell that vehicles, buildings were redone as full-on 3D models but they were well integrated with the hand-drawn characters. What solidified that mind-blowing-away-ness was watching The Rebuild of Evangelion featurette. It went through how they reconstructed Tokyo-3′s buildings as 3D models and the layers of effects they put over it to achieve the images in the film.

And I thought, “I’m an engineer. I’m an artist. I can do that.”

Just to give you an idea of what’s inspiring me, here’s some screencaps from Evangelion. First up is Tokyo-3. Those skyscrapers are 3D and the houses in front are painted:

Below is one of Tokyo-3′s buildings as it’s rising out of the Geofront. The staircase for the overhead walkway, the rail guard, and trees are painted. The building is created in 3D and toon-shaded. You can see this scene in Rebuild of Evangelion as they go through the different processes of making this scene. It starts out with some crude drawings of a tree with the 3D elements behind it and then gets refined and various filters and effects are used to create the sunset scene.

I’m not sure how much CG is in this shot (I think the Angel in the upper right is CG but most of this shot looks painted), but it is quite an epic view of Tokyo-3:

As an artist, I’ve shied away from doing 3D and mixing it with my hand drawn work. I have this mental block that says, “It’s cool, but it’s cheating.” I’ve seen plenty of brilliant artists on DeviantArt who have the skills to create amazing art without having to resort to it. I vowed to myself unconsciously that I would never cheat, but now that I’ve seen the Rebuild of Evangelion it’s removed that block from my mind. It’s not cheating to me anymore. I decided I wanted to make cinematic, cel-shaded looking artwork and with that I started exploring my old friend, Blender.

Blender has gone through a great deal of changes since I last used it back in January of 2008. For instance the entire UI has changed. I had long forgotten everything I knew about modeling and rendering with Blender so it wasn’t an issue. I downloaded the latest stable build and got to work learning the ins-and-outs of this new beast.

Without further ado, this is the final rendering at 1920×1080:

I did this as a request for a Deviant Art member. It wasn’t enough for me to just draw his character. I didn’t want another free floating character without a backdrop. I wanted a cinematic look. I wanted a detailed background, toon-rendered, and bigger than life. I drew his character from the position of a camera looking down at her and to reinforce that perspective I decided to create a city to match. I deliberated on how I would approach this for a few days and then decided to go into Blender and just start modeling rudimentary block buildings and came out with this:

I superimposed my finished version of the girl, her name is Superhawke, over top of the first rendering and it served as a crude prototype. From there I built a better city and pulled the camera back to make it appear that she was higher up and floating in the sky above 50 story skyscrapers. The buildings are still fairly low-poly. I used some of Evangelion’s rebuild of Tokyo-3 as a benchmark for various details. I put simple air-conditioning units and water towers on the rooftops to give them more life. I placed some crude trees which were there to show scale and color so I could paint over them in Photoshop later.

This is the final version of that city as it was rendered:

While I was constructing this city I had begun doing various rendering tests to get down the toon shading.  The first test I did was just to use Blender’s edge rendering with the toon shaded materials. What happens is that some of the lines don’t show up and if you render it to small the lines are thick. I’d have to go into Photoshop and up the levels until the lines were dark enough and I didn’t want to do that since the color would be ruined. The thick lines, bleck. Do not want. I wanted the right colors and sharp, thin lines where I expected them to be. To get thin lines what you need to do is to render out at least 200% larger than your final resolution (which is 1920×1080 for me). In Photoshop I could then resize the image and get my crisp lines. Still, some of the thinner lines don’t show up. I decided the best way would be if I could separate out the line rendering and shading so I could manipulate the lines to darken them and composite everything together.

Well, Blender has a means of doing that when it finishes the rendering, it’s called (wait for it) the compositor. You can basically add nodes and string them together to manipulate the rendered images and layer them together. You can try and combine nodes to create all sorts of effects. To do this you need different render layers. So, one layer had my AC Units with the shadeless materials so I could get the the black lines on a white background. The only rendering options I set on this layer was to do edges. The edge rendering was set to 100. The second layer was my toon shaded version and it had all of the default rendering options checked. To get darker lines I used the RGB curve on the line render layer and increased the levels until the lines showed up and then Blender composites the toon-shaded layer to it using an Overlay mix node.

Here is a line shading test with shadows:

Here’s the blender compositor node setup I used:

click to enlarge

This is the final rendering with both the toon render layer and the lines:

So far so good. I figured out a decent way of doing the rendering. Here’s the problem: with my city scene doing the compositing in Blender is going to be a pain in the ass. Basically it means duplicating the geometry and there’s already a lot of geometry for the city. This is what my blender file looks like from the camera’s POV:

Doubling that geo to do both layers would tax my machine. I attempted it anyway and it only caused Blender to up and crash during the rendering phase after all that trouble. So it was back to the alternative way: render out the individual scenes for line rendering and the toon shading and composite them in Photoshop. Here’s a grayscale version of the buildings with the lines as composited in Photoshop:

Once I had all of this going there were a few other tests I wanted to try. I wanted to see if I could reflect the sky in some of the buildings but building a skybox, while that was easy, didn’t provide good results. It’s something I still need to explore. I thought of environment maps, but I’m still shaky on how they work in Blender. I even played with ambient occlusion and got this rendering:

I thought of compositing that with my final image, but the AO just doesn’t fit. I wanted cel-shaded coloring and it would make it look too shaded.

One more note, I also tried a version of Blender 2.5 with Freestyle integrated. Freestyle is a Google Summer of Code project to do toon rendering. I thought it would be a boon and solve all my problems. Certainly there are scripts in there that do an amazing job. I found one with the right line thickness and decent enough shading, but alas, it didn’t work out. Everytime I tried to render my city at 200% the resolution it would crash Blender. I tried the parametric line rendering but it didn’t work either. Of course this version of Blender 2.5 is an experimental one, so it’ll be a bit before it’s working well. I thought of going back to an older version of Blender with Freestyle as well, but honestly, it’s a different UI, and I’m not interested in learning it. So this approach was the best way and something I intend to explore further.

As for my friend…we watched Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22 and it left him brimming with questions and no resolution so I picked up the Evangelion TV series and we rewatched that. All I can say is, he’s seen it all now except for End of Evangelion which we’ll watch sooner or later. Those last two episodes of the TV show…painful, utterly painful to watch for me nowadays. Of course, Eva’s probably not best marathoned straight through. Back when I was in high school we did that to a friend. When he watched the last episode he turned to us and said, “I’m never watching anime again.”

Here’s how it works: You create an initial batch of particles (maybe 25 to 100 hair particles). You then “bake” the particles out — that is they become editable. From there you’re able to enter a particle mode and comb the strands of hair, grow them out, add new ones, remove hairs, cut hairs, etc and stylize them until you’re happy with the output. Towards the end of your hairstyling escapades you can turn on children hair particles that use the 25-100 hair particles you have as a template for how they should grow and conform to the head. That’s 2-3 hours of work. I would say the new Blender hair styling system is really damn good. I look forward to outfitting Albino with stylized fur.

But, if you want to play with hair in blender, get this build:

http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=560 

That is the beautiful thing about open source. GraphicAll.org is a site that builds many different versions of Blender — usually the builders also test them and viola, before there is a new official Blender release, you can be playing with the new tools and technology that the Blender Foundation has to offer. I found a new one with Jahka particles — the programmer is named Jahka I think. He’s redone the entire particle system and give us Blenderites an incredible hair particle system.

Of course they would need it because of the Foundation’s current animated movie project Peach.

It looks a lot easier to stylize hair, so I’m eager to try it out. Maybe I can get something even better than a washed out punk rocker this time. If things work out, I’ll post a new image…

A small stuffed animal. He might look cute, but we all know the truth. He’s evil to the core although all he ever wants (porportly) is to bite your face off with his non-existent mouth or get some candy and let it absorb into his body as if he were the blob. My brother and I knew of his fowlness and thusly, his full name is “Albino the Brain Sucking Grimby.” He doesn’t actually do that or anything else. Now here he is in 3D with fur and without fur:

The fur one, when you look at it closely, isn’t there yet, but I didn’t spend much time on getting the fur to move correctly. The model itself is a work-in-progress. I still need to add details to his paws (hands) and figure out how I want to texture map him or just use base colors and furry-ize him to death. The fur version of Albino has 100,000 fur particle covering his body. I would need to use forcefields and whatnot to get them to stand in the correct way. Might be do-able. I spent all day yesterday familiarizing myself with Blender’s particle system — mainly for doing hair, but that’s really tough. I tried to add hair to my head model (see previous post for bad renders the head model). I managed to get the hair from looking really, really bad to looking like barbie doll hair or a washed-up punk rocker chick after a night of binge drinking and cocaine. I need to improve my technique or there are tools that Blender needs in the barber shop area. I saw that they’re working on some, and I look forward with great anticipation at what the next release of Blender will harbor for hairstyling.

My goal for Albino Grimby is to make him a fully articulate 3D character. So he’ll be modeled, textured, and rigged. Then I can do some animations with him. Like this one:

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/albinofly.avi

Notice, though, that the Albino in the animation has a big ole mouth. That would actually be Albino’s japanese brother, “Mangabino.” From there, I’d even like to experiment with him in Blender’s game engine or in DirectX. That might be fun to have a fully articulate character. It would also be great to test him with my OBJ code to ensure that it still works and raytrace him via my homebrewed raytracer.

Where is all of this 3D going? I’m definitely not interested in getting a job as a 3D modeler. I’m quite happy as a software engineering. I’m content with this being a hobby. I’m also happy to support Blender and freeware. If freeware is this damn good, then I say, let’s keep going in that direction.

I’d like to see my characters live in 3D most of all. Especially this one, which is the ultimate goal. (BTW, potentially NSFW.)

Oh, here’s another render of the same mesh I but with different lighting and rendering settings:

And just for kicks, here’s an alien face I did yesterday. The goal for this mesh was just to see how fast I could model a face from scratch. I wasn’t trying to make it look beautiful. I wanted it as ugly as I could get it and see what kind of monster would appear.

That’s all I got for you right now. More to come.

Oh, did I hear you say something about DS Homebrew? How’s that going, you ask. Not going right now. Going slowly maybe. I’m torn between letting my Blender kick play itself out, but there are some hefty things I want to model and it seems that now is the time to be learning and moving towards that goal — besides I seem to be moving pretty damn fast at the pace I’m picking up and learning things in Blender. I’m also trying to relegate Blender to the weekends and spend the scant hours I have during the weekdays to write code and study DS stuff.

As for rotoscoping reference — I didn’t use any. I just used my best judgement and the help from one of the online videos I found at Montage Studios. This one came out a little bit better and was fun to put together. One day of course, this face will have to be linked to the rest of the body, but we’ll see. That’s still quite hard for me at this stage.

Okay, maybe not a final, final render, but I think except for some tweaks here and there, it’s pretty much done. There are some things I can do, which you’d never see, so I think I’ll skip doing them. Maybe it’s lazy, but this being my first Blender 3D project I’m pretty damn content with the way it turned out. It’s probably not the most efficiently modeled 3D object and the texturing is half-assed, but it looks damn good.

For those interested, I used subdivision surfaces and except for the four lights on the bottom of the wiimote, everything else is actually one mesh — the face plate, the entire body of the wiimote, everything. One mesh. It was hard working with the subdivision surfaces at times because it likes everything to be rounded and things on the wiimote’s faceplate have sharper corners. In retrospect maybe I should have found some different way to do the faceplate, making the holes for all the buttons proved to be quite an undertaking and resulted in creating a lot of the edge loops around the wiimote mesh. I wanted to try and capture as much of the geometry of the wiimote as possible. I think I succeeded. I’ll post a montage rendering of the wiimote in various positions. For tonight, you get this:

Today…I spent the last day of my vacation being somewhat industrious. Blender’s really piqued my interest in 3D modeling again. So after a day of work, here’s what I have: an almost complete, untextured Nintendo Wiimote. I did it using images I found off the Internets and modeled the entire thing with subdivision surfaces. Throughout my entire marathon modeling session, Blender didn’t once throw a fit or crash. Amazing. trueSpace or Martin Hash would have crashed a hundred times by now.

Reference Image (I used photoshop and cut it up into a front, top, and side view and discarded the ones I didn’t use):

A shitty render of my modeling work (I’ve got to learn how to set up lights and render better):

Enjoy! I need food and lots of TV now. Back to work tomorrow…

I gotta say, it’s easy to get into 3D modeling with Blender and it feels great knowing that it’s a full 3D modeling package. Not once did it crash on me while I was modeling either — most stable software I’ve used. There’s one issue: when you load a background image, make sure it’s small. I had a 3 mb TIFF file as a background image to reference my model building off of, and having that in there considerably slowed down Blender. I think if you want a reference background image make sure it’s below 100kb — jpeg compressed. This was made just manipulating polygons and using subdivision surfaces. It’s supposed to be a female face, but honesty can you tell? (Well, the face has a beak like Ashley Tisdale, so maybe it kinda does.) I used to draw a lot of female characters and I would love to become adept at modeling one in 3D.

The work is based off a tutorial which you can find at MontageStudio. I find them to be really great video tutorials. They’re all medium to high quality videos and the guy goes through things step by step. I learned a lot about Blender’s interface just by doing the face tutorial. Definitely a good place to start — er, if you’re a beginner to intermediate modeler.

My goal with blender: a full on 3D humanoid character. You’ll know how it goes because it’ll be posted on here.