SeithCG

Today I thought “I’m going to try that Mudbox program I heard so much about”. I had very briefly (~10 minutes) tried Zbrush before, but was turned away by the weird “proprietary” interface.

So I just exported a low-rez mesh I modeled in Maya, imported it in Mudbox as an .obj file and quickly started “sculpting” away using my Wacom tablet. And I have to say I was amazed by the ease of use and the level of control offered by the program. Now realism is not really my cup of tea, but this was a great refresher on anatomy. Don’t know if I’ll ever get around to finishing it though…

Anyway, I hadn’t sculpted anything since I was about 15 years old, and it was weird to find again the feeling of manipulating clay through a digital pencil and a flat screen. But hey, I’m a believer now! Kudos to the Skymatter guys, or I should say Autodesk, since they’ve been bought by the owners of Maya. Which incidentally was another great plus for me: the navigation in Mudbox is the same as in Maya! Zero learning curve! Yay! 😛

I just released something I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks; it’s called MayaCGF and it’s a Maya tool to import models from the game Crysis into Maya. It also lets you export your models into the game of course! You can find all the instructions here.

While importing some game models for testing purpose, I’ve been shocked by the amount of details put into the human faces. I mean those could almost be used for feature with just a smooth level added. Congrats to the Crytek artists!

Oh and I almost forgot; it looks like “Seith’s Little Island” was published on a German magazine’s DVD called “PC ACTION” during the month of March. I don’t know the details, but still, that’s nice!

I released a new poseLib version with a couple of minor fixes. As usual you can find it here. I also updated the shotCam rig with both a new shotCam.ma file and the matching shotCamLister script which you can find here. Another addition to the Crysis tools I put up is crysisCleanupObj which fixes the problems inherent to exporting a brush as an .obj file from Sandbox2. It’s available on the MEL scripts page.

As a side note, I see my little Crysis map has been downloaded more then a thousand and six hundred times on Crymod (and I don’t dare to look how many times on this site). That’s just ridiculous.

Oh and I’m 99% done with the first pass of the 3D layout on my movie. Yay!

Here we go, I just added a very short tutorial detailing the steps I follow to export a Maya static model (meaning no rig yet) into Crysis. Let me know if I can clarify anything…

Update: The steps are a bit different now (new file) and I added a pdf version here.

Update 2: I worked on the MEL scripts and they do work a bit better. Now I can export my knight model with one click!

Of course there’s still lots of problems, things I don’t understand and such… And no animation yet. Still waiting for the SDK to get some badly needed information…

I don’t know if you heard of a game called “Crysis” (which should be on the shelves in about 2 weeks), but a demo was recently released, and I just started playing with the editor. It’s basically a program which allows you to build “levels” for the game. However by “level” I mean landscapes the size of Switzerland.

Anyway you can do almost anything you want in there, from adding blades of grass to raise mountains. And the lighting engine included is also mighty impressive. It features Sub-Surface-Scattering, depth of field, motion blur, oceans, realistic night and day cycles, and… all in real time of course. Lotsa fun!

Update: I added the download link at the bottom of the page.

It looks like my pipeline is almost complete now! Although I’ll probably have to get a proper compositing software at some point. I’m thinking After Effects, since most of the other software is Adobe; at least I get some free compatibility!

Woohoo, I finally found the book on Rackham I mentioned earlier! Actually it’s the English version, and the title doesn’t mention any “enchanter”, but it’s all the same!

Super, alors c’est officialement genial n’est-ce pas: j’ai trouve le bouquin en question! C’est la version anglaise avec un titre un peu different, mais c’est le meme!

One glance through those pages and the source of inspiration of so many artists becomes so apparent (Brian Froud, Alan Lee, John Howe…etc…).

Un seul regard a travers ces pages, et l’inspiration de nombre d’illustrateurs devient tres evidente…