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zeibekiko dancer 3d modeling

This is my first blog of the year and I am excited to share some of my new work that actually kept this blog lethargic and inactive for quite a while….I will also chat about what kept me busy and what to expect to see in near the future in this blog as I am currently preparing for my next quest on sound design!

This year I decided to undertake 3d Graphic Design, Virtual modelling with 3ds max 2010 despite my primary ignorance to this field. The reason being, curiosity, spread my knowledge for myself and my future career. I wanted to start simple since I could hardly locate the “play” button early in September in 2009, and as I loved to keep it simple and yet creative with a touch of art and love for my country Greece, I decided to create the zeibekiko dancer out of a pile of possible options as you can in my relevant flickr set.

So, a sweet come back & a gift from me is the wall-paperzzz… you can either download them from my flickr account or down beloooww here!

I ended up with the zeibekiko dancer miniature to model after archaeological research about Cycladic idols, minimalism and sculpting. I could hardly find anything similar on the web in terms of tutorials. So with advice from my tutor Yone & an old 3ds max veteran friend Vasilis owing his own great little company up in Leeds riotdesign.co.uk

It all begun with a box…like all of us at some age and stage….

I then extruded polygons for the feet, hand and head. Of course I was using the planes with photos of my model in a T shape and then I also added the top view which was a great help in creating the hands and the head. Of course my model was rough and edgy like a robocop at that stage (as I use to call him), so the trick for me was to reference a copy of the model and apply turbo-smooth on it. Later I would have to bring this referenced copy within the rough polygon so I could see my way through and be more precise. When finished I would have to apply soft selection to further mould and shape the model into a more organic and imperfect handmade shapes.

Material. UV unwrap or not to unwrap? – You tell me. I used a simple brown bumpy material and work my way some glossiness, specular levels and alpha channel for diffuse of course, got some black colour on it and applied it to the image. Scanned my A4 sized sheets and added them as materials to the background plane. Had I decided to go unwrapping, you wouldn’t see the stretchiness you see on his feet and hands, according to my tutor…Yes I am a happy beginner and the world is my oyster beginning from this model, thank you!

Lights. I tried to simulate the light in my room at the time of shooting as much as possible and yet as simple as possible. I worked with Lightrace lights. as you can probably see 1 on the left up and another on the right up, a warmer one. and my favourite saviour skylight. The reason I love it is because even with this only you can get a great realistic lights on your model really. But boy it took me for ever… the result you see is an outcome of trial and error and Adobe Lightroom tweaking on the final render.

Camera. Simple target camera, but don’t get me wrong I changed about 3 until I got it right…that depth of field gave me some headaches and endless rendering times. So? I welded & chamfered the edges of the crossing point of the 2 back white planes and got on with it…sweet

Render time….is tea time….after a lot of pain though…to somebody who knows; what is hours for me is actually a few clicks away for them. It took me about 90 min to render it in A3 size on Windows 7 64 bit on 6Gb RAM and 2 latest Nvidia cards running on parallels on the latest Mac Book Pro.

Next post is going to be on the 25th of February related to Sound Design project on Apple Logic Pro….its called: The infinite loop-ambient bird singing project!!!

Calliope Muse was edited by Calliope Georgousi 2009

...more info at the Colophon

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