Month of boredom: bendy doggo WIP 04 (Patreon)

Now that the posing is nearly done, I can begin scene setup. I'm cheating a bit because I already have started it, so you won't see much experimentation and failure here. We're moving on from working in ZBrush to working in 3ds Max.

The first thing to do is obviously to export everything from ZB, but that's nothing interesting, so I won't show how I do that. XD The second thing is just as bad, because it involves importing all the things to Max. Once that is done, we get something like this:

Now with 100% more ridiculous colors! So after fixing that (and it doesn't really matter, but I like having consistent colors for objects), setting up a camera and aspect ratio, we get this:

Temporary black eyes woooooo! The yarn will probably have a different color as well, but I'll have to pick that once I have more of a palette established. Anyway, we need a studio or room or otherwise an environment here.

Step 1: draw a rectangle in the front view.

Step 2: fillet the corner that will be visible in the frame (for aesthetics).

Step 3: extrude the resulting shape so that it's actually 3D, and rotate the view confusingly to show the audience that it works.

Step 4: add a shell modifier to make the walls more solid. This will prevent all kinds of light leaks around the corners.

Et voila. We have a studio-room combination (that fillet is the studio bit; this will look more like a flat background than an actual room). Now we will only place a large light source on the ceiling, like so:

And now we have this in our camera viewport:

We are ready to do the first preview render! Here's what we have:

I've also enabled the frame stamp thingy so that you can see the render times, and how they will grow over time. Now, I think that chair needs some legs, so let's do that.

The easiest way to handle that is to draw a spline in a side view, and give it thickness. Then copy it by rotating it around the chair's pivot point (the object's center, pretty much). Here's the result:

Let's just add some mild machining details to those legs by editing them manually.

And there we go! Of course the legs messed up the previously established composition, so I had to move the camera a little. This sometimes happens several times while making a background. XD

NOW WE NEED SOME SHADERS (a.k.a. materials but I like calling them shaders because it's a cooler word so there).

In this case, I will first set up a shader for the room thing. We will also need UVs on it because I want to assign a gradient map to it. While it is possible to have object-space, world-space, or screen-space mapping on any map, having actual UVs will give us more control here. I want the room to become darker the further away from the camera, and off-white on the other side. Vaguely the same colors, still. And here's the result:

Much clearer, and much more balanced. The shader is incredibly simple, so I won't be showing that here (you'll see it later among other shaders).

Here's also a fun alternative angle; looks kinda nice too:

That's not a shadow - that's our gradient map affecting the room.

After a while, the shaders are done! Except the yarn; that'll be slightly more work. But here's the result:

Note how the render time has pretty much doubled now. Here's also the current view of the material editor:

Everything in the upper half will be assigned to Jinjing-Yu, and everything in the lower half is scene-related. I always lay out my materials like this. The lower-right quarter is for technical stuff - stuff like effects, environment maps, etc. We have none of that stuff in this piece tho.

That's all the wörk for today! I'd probably do more if I weren't in the middle of playing 7 Days to Die - that game is a serious productivity hazard. ._. And I guess I did a decent amount of work today anyway! :D

Enjoy? :^)