breakdowns and tutorials

Digital Choi: Evolution of a fantasy character.

By Carl Keifer

This project started for me about a year ago, I was struggling to find work and looking to get together a great looking piece for my portfolio. I made a bet with a friend of mine that I could accurately sculpt his face in the computer. The prize was a sandwich of my choosing, which, at the time, was more than enough. Needless to say I won the sandwich and,with the taste of thinly sliced deli style victory on my lips and the start of a great digital resource, I decided I would build a project around the model. Not wanting to get into an epic story, but still wanting to work with an epic setting, I decided to design something akin to a movie trailer or game cinematic that would look and feel like it belonged to a larger project. The real life reference of my digital model works as a fight coordinator for many of the projects that come through the Pittsburgh area. Being that he is also getting on in years but still looks like he is young I decided to wrap his physical abilities and characteristics into the look of the character. So I wanted the piece to be an action sequence, but also about magic. Analogue(real life) Mark Choi also has a large dog that he is usually running around with so I figured our hero could have a beast that he rides on that resembles this dog. Currently I am working to make a sequence where Digital Choi and his dog fight a monster, break an aqueduct, and save a princess. It was around this time I also saw a similar piece from the Vancouver School for Digital Effects called "A Summoner" by Aasa Ooraikul, which pretty much set the bar for what I was expecting in quality.

Digital Choi Material development

This project from it's creation was intended to push my limits to the max. While this was easy for things like dynamics and rigging, thinking up complex material types to deal with is still a bit of a challenge. Design of the materials hinged mainly off deciding on a pipeline, the process I intended to use to get my character from being a simple model all the way to a production ready character, the choice for me as far as materials were concerned was to render using mental Ray. After locking this decision down I could start designing materials that would work with this rendering package and add the most to my character. the following page will go over creating the subsurface shader for the head, building the complex network of belts and straps to cover the upper body, and working on a complex blinn layered shader for the pants.

Digital Choi: Dynamics of a fantasy character

A large part of this project was designed to showcase my technical ability in rigging and dynamic simulation. So naturally I designed characters that utilized everything that I could throw at maya. the following page will cover all the dynamic aspects of digital choi. First we will look at my adventures in styling choi's digital coiffure using the dynamics system to help me along. Then we will take a look at the rigging aspects of the character and how I was able to use maya's muscle systems to get choi to perform digital acrobatics, and a series of math equations relating to the rigging of realistic armor movement. Then we will talk about the finishing touches of the character and how I used a secondary hair system to drive some jiggly dynamic straps that would hold the armor together.

Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 February 2011 12:55