Rip, Rig, Render

[Tristam Green]

This one is too dark.

I beg to differ, I think it's quite perfect and badass.

Lookin' good Ant, you even got me in the exact spot of Spiral Hell I love

 

[Zaltana]

mine will be hell on wheels i know it.

 

[Anttaru]

I beg to differ, I think it's quite perfect and badass.

Lookin' good Ant, you even got me in the exact spot of Spiral Hell I love

It's how you described it, so it made more sense to capture the position with the most extension.

Only thing i had to change on that was the positioning if the scythe. Before the handle and the hook was crossing the ground surface, so i moved the scythe up and tilted it forward so the blade is just touching the ground.

 

[K. Ishitar]

you could only do so much with TG since he's full of lol, good job making the best of it!

I'll submit kay's info soon one for thf and another for drk

 

[Tristam Green]

mine will be hell on wheels i know it.

training wheels maybe

you could only do so much with TG since he's full of lol, good job making the best of it!

and gtf back in the kitchen.

ot: gj anttaru

 

[Mortanis]

Done up Mortanis...
The Black Knight

Looks great man! I would love to have a sweet statue of my character. The digital arts school I used to go to had a 3d printer that could make 3d models in real life, makes me wish I still went there so I could have one of those students make me one. It created models out of this special resin clay that was really brittle and would break very easily, but I would have painted it up and sprayed it with some kind of epoxy.

Yeah, I bet the scythe would look awful if you smoothed it. Maybe just select and smooth the polygons in the handle and not the blade part.

All these pics are looking great!

 

[Anttaru]

Looks great man! I would love to have a sweet statue of my character. The digital arts school I used to go to had a 3d printer that could make 3d models in real life, makes me wish I still went there so I could have one of those students make me one. It created models out of this special resin clay that was really brittle and would break very easily, but I would have painted it up and sprayed it with some kind of epoxy.

Yeah, I bet the scythe would look awful if you smoothed it. Maybe just select and smooth the polygons in the handle and not the blade part.

All these pics are looking great!

I could have just extruded the faces keeping them in lined with the original edges and splitting a few new faces and the smoothening would be ok. I was being lazy

Those 3D printers really are cool, I've never actually had the pleasure of using one though.

Check out this 3D printer. It has colour too

Z Corp. ZPrinter 450

 

[Solan]

I could have just extruded the faces keeping them in lined with the original edges and splitting a few new faces and the smoothening would be ok. I was being lazy

Those 3D printers really are cool, I've never actually had the pleasure of using one though.

Check out this 3D printer. It has colour too

Z Corp. ZPrinter 450

Duuuuude that is the craziest shit I've ever seen. I'd even pay for a Solan figure.

EDIT**
See spoiler for positions on jobs etc.

Spoiler:

WAR

DRG

Also my friend Dymond wants to know if you can make him one to when you are done with what you're doing.

 

[Motarrisu]

just curious but have you come across any models that just won't smooth properly? I just got into starting to mess around with models (just for image making and learning 3d studio max) and started to mess around with the black mage artifact body piece.

Apparently the lower part of the coat is disconnected at edges all over the place and hard as I try, the section just under the belt will not connect at all... *suddenly realizes that the body got capped off right at the waist which is why welding wouldn't work*.

Just wondering if you've come across any other models that have similar problems.

 

[Anttaru]

just curious but have you come across any models that just won't smooth properly? I just got into starting to mess around with models (just for image making and learning 3d studio max) and started to mess around with the black mage artifact body piece.

Apparently the lower part of the coat is disconnected at edges all over the place and hard as I try, the section just under the belt will not connect at all... *suddenly realizes that the body got capped off right at the waist which is why welding wouldn't work*.

Just wondering if you've come across any other models that have similar problems.

Yes I've come across it a few times. The Galka's body armor done it, the Female Elvaan with the Beetle Harness. The Harness would separate at 2 different parts when smoothened, plus the top of the leaping boots would break a part of the leg when smoothening it. For that i actually extruded the faces so the leather on her legs is actually slightly thicker than the original.

Considering your not going to animate the character, I'll give you a quick solution to dealing with the breaking.

- Drag the separate pieces apart. (Just for easy viewing, when your done you can set the position back to 0 and the armor will be back in place.)

- Looking at the bottom of the armor you'll see some unwanted/unneeded surfacing. Basically you want the armor to be hollow.

- Delete the unwanted surfaces then do a test smoothen.

You might want to avoid extruding new faces, it messes up the texture mapping on the new faces.

Again with the Beetle Harness: The top part that was breaking after deleting the surface in that section i still ran into problems, so i deleted all the faces around that area (that edge would the solar plexus and mid torso) smoothened the model, then extruded new faces to attach to the other side. since the texture was messed up i used a simple Lambert shader and painted it black. and I've been getting away with it.


.
.
.

On a side note i noticed this is your first and only post in QCDN Motarrisu. May i ask how you found this thread ?

 

[Motarrisu]

The thread came up while i was doing some searches about ffxi models. I'd been looking all over for any extra information I could find. I think the search where I was looking for a possibility of higher resolution textures is where it came up. *checks* I typed ffxi texture into google and it was on the 5th page lol. It kinda surprised me when the date was actually recent, so I figured I'd ask in case I'm missing a simpler solution. I'd only started messing around with this 4 days ago and I'm still just learning my way around the tools of 3d studio max for when I get to that class in school.

The more I work with the BLM body the more confusing it gets lol. After finally getting the bottom of the coat attached, I found the collar was detatched - I managed to attach the collar to itself but I left it detached from the neck since it isn't visible anyway (I'm doing the taru version).

After getting that finished I found that the cuffs of the coat were not only detached, but closed from the body with no matching edges to fit to the body. I wound up cutting new edges on the back side of the cuffs and welding vertexes to match up the shape of the end of the sleeve that goes to the cuff.

Changing the mesh into an editable poly and checking for borders, I know at the least that this is the last issue I'm going to have... with this piece... It just seems like it never ends lol. I wouldn't have realized some of these problems had I not picked a pose that exposed so many of them, but at the least doing this is forcing me to learn more about the tools available.

I did one model really quickly (after thinking I had finished with the blm... but I noticed the cuff after looking at this one).



If you look at the full size (whether you get transparency with firefox or the feint green with IE) you'll see the spot on the left arm (right side of the pic) where the hand attaches to the arm and noticed it's not quite attached.

I guess this cuff problem is going to be a recurring one...

 

[Anttaru]

Excuse my delayed response, I had company over.

The thread came up while i was doing some searches about ffxi models. I'd been looking all over for any extra information I could find. I think the search where I was looking for a possibility of higher resolution textures is where it came up.
*checks* I typed ffxi texture into google and it was on the 5th page lol. It kinda surprised me when the date was actually recent, so I figured I'd ask in case I'm missing a simpler solution.

Yeah you probably heard me mentioning how poor the textures are, and I'm not willing to air brush any new textures at higher resolutions. Main reason for not doing this is because the original texture maps are really mangled lol. I make nice uniform maps when i do things from scratch.

I'd only started messing around with this 4 days ago and I'm still just learning my way around the tools of 3d studio max for when I get to that class in school.

Very cool. When I went to school for this we used Maya and Houdini. Back then Houdini's interface made us feel sad, so we did everything with Maya. Now Houdini got a face lift and has many interesting tools. In the end all 3D software is capable of doing the same thing. Even though the tools and some of the terminology is different between Max and Maya, I'll be happy to assist you the best i can in this very thread.

The more I work with the BLM body the more confusing it gets lol. After finally getting the bottom of the coat attached, I found the collar was detatched - I managed to attach the collar to itself but I left it detached from the neck since it isn't visible anyway (I'm doing the taru version).

If you find difficulty figuring it out I'll look into making a series of images step by step with explanation as to how i solved this problem. Understanding the way of polygons and knowing how to model with them is key.

After getting that finished I found that the cuffs of the coat were not only detached, but closed from the body with no matching edges to fit to the body. I wound up cutting new edges on the back side of the cuffs and welding vertexes to match up the shape of the end of the sleeve that goes to the cuff.

Changing the mesh into an editable poly and checking for borders, I know at the least that this is the last issue I'm going to have... with this piece... It just seems like it never ends lol. I wouldn't have realized some of these problems had I not picked a pose that exposed so many of them, but at the least doing this is forcing me to learn more about the tools available.

I did one model really quickly (after thinking I had finished with the blm... but I noticed the cuff after looking at this one).



If you look at the full size (whether you get transparency with firefox or the feint green with IE) you'll see the spot on the left arm (right side of the pic) where the hand attaches to the arm and noticed it's not quite attached.

I guess this cuff problem is going to be a recurring one...

I looked at it with my firefox. I can't make out what your trying to point out on the left arm.

4 days on Max and your already doing all this. You have tremendous potential. As you'd know, take one thing at a time. I see the image you posted is indeed a software render like what i have been exposing here.

I'm curious to know, are you hiding the hair ? Cause I can show you how to make the transparent surfaces on the hair, transparent.

I've been using the same textures as you have been, except the one for the face (which has the entire head texture.) I had to modify it.

Since I've been using the same textures you have been, your probably wondering how to make the render look more photo realistic. If your interested I'll show you some techniques. I remember when i was in school, the guy that had minor experience excelled in every project. Beyond the rest of us. Except for final project, that one belonged to me ^^

 

[Solan]

I think he meant the wrist on the models right hand (the hand on the left from our view), Not sure that's just the one thing I can see where it looks a little different.

 

[Motarrisu]

Yeah, Solan's got it. I circled the spot on the image below:


On closer inspection, I think it actually is supposed to be like that, in the picture above I looked in model viewer and zoomed in around that particular spot, it looks like the thing that's hanging in my render actually is free standing. Thinking back, I'm not exactly sure I made that render with mesh smooth running since I'm not seeing the normal rounding, which made me think I should double check it.

I'm curious to know, are you hiding the hair ? Cause I can show you how to make the transparent surfaces on the hair, transparent.

I've resorted to delete the extra surfaces (much to my own disappointment). I spent hours looking for the method required to hide the clipping polygons, but for the life of me I couldn't find the right one (Boolean? didn't work, something with Heirarchy? don't know how it works lol, can't figure out the proper term for it to do a search). The poor DRK in the picture has two holes on the side of his head right now. The BLM I'm working on has 2 flat sections of hair underneath his hat.

Since I've been using the same textures you have been, your probably wondering how to make the render look more photo realistic. If your interested I'll show you some techniques. I remember when i was in school, the guy that had minor experience excelled in every project. Beyond the rest of us. Except for final project, that one belonged to me ^^

That would be nice information. I eventually want to make a nice little group picture of my character in each type of Artifact Armor and lay it out with some nice shadows and maybe make my own setting or extract a zone from FFXI and add realistic grass or bump mapped terrain for it, so anything to help take that project a step further is welcome (of course, I have to GET to that step yet... *whips out the blow-torch and gets back to welding*).

I watched a tutorial on You-Tube about making Photorealistic Skin, so I get the concepts of needing a Bump Map of greyscale values for depth, a specular map to account for the shine of metal and such. I also realize I need the alpha maps for the occasional piece of equipment and most hair that has a transparent spot.

So far, I've been using the textures for the look of the character and using that straight up as the bump map as well. The dark knight picture I put up is with the bump setting as 400. I kinda get that I need to set the specular map properly to get that metallic look right without doing what I had tried earlier and setting a whole new material and changing it on the polygons by hand (which... doesn't work in some cases... darn WAR AF...).

I actually tried using the transparency map as the specular map (the .dds file) but I haven't gone back to check if that backfired or not. When I was messing with Graphics Converter 3, I noticed that the not-quite black sections were the pieces of armor that were supposed to shine, but that's a dark color, I don't know if the alpha was counted as white or as black... I'm thinking the latter but I didn't mess with my light enough to find out.

And again any information you can help me with is more than welcome. I'm a few years behind in actually messing with any of these kinds of programs. A friend of my brother kept setting me up with some 3d programs on my computer after I kept having a problem with it that he fixed, but I never got into the programs because I couldn't figure out how to work with a single tool at the time and avoided it entirely... to this day I seriously regret that).

 

[Motarrisu]

On a side note - I finished closing all the borders I could find -


I tried making a 3 point lighting scheme to brighten things up and reduced the darkness of the shadows on the model a touch to make the face more visible.

I actually think I should go back and split that edge in the coat where it splits open (if it's just one edge apiece), don't like the way it's stretching.

 

[Anttaru]

Dragoon Nuts.

The Pole arm has a lot of reach, so for the close up i figured it was best not to stuff the whole character in the shot.

Ninja Version

I tried to adjust the lighting to a more reasonable state with little time to spare. I had to increase the lights intensity and make the stage bigger for the Nidhogg Render. I can decrease the ambiance for the shaders, but then I'd have to do it for all the textures. Which might not be such a bad idea., Global Illumination is so minimal you can't even notice a difference with it on, and this is without Final Gather, and the darks aren't looking so dark anymore.

To Motarrisu: I'll get back to you on that, so in case you make it back to this thread before i get to fully respond, rest assure i plan on delivering some more information.

About the hair and the surfaces.

-Take the .dds file to Graphics Converter and save as alpha channel.

- Open the Alpha Channel in Photoshop (set the mode to RGB)

- Import the BMP of the face texture.

- Layer the Alpha channel and cut out the unwanted pieces using the alpha channel as a guide. you want transparency

- Save as Targa (.TGA)

- Use the new Targa as the face texture and your hair will have the needed transparent parts of the surfacing.

Next we'll talk about lighting. That is the most important thing when reaching for a good looking render.

 

[StanDarsh]

@.@ Eh, wrong hair color. I must have gotten something mixed up looking at the list on FFXIclopedia. That aside though, that's fucking sick. Awesome job man thanks. Setting this as my new background.

 

[K. Ishitar]

it only looks good because it can't be you...nice job ant!

he has the same hair model as me but silver hair

 

[Lucki]

Needs more BST action . But seriously, this is some quality work you have going. Keep up the good work!

 

[Solan]

Shit thats looking good, do you think you'd be able to make a BG using this?

By BG I mean the ones here