Dwarf Hammerer

[musashidan]

wow, what a great forum.I've lurked for a while so i think i'll bite the bullet and post! I'm pretty embarrassed as the quality of work here is simply amazing.
Great site,hope it grows and grows........clap

EDIT: Thanks Pascal,that fixed it. :thumbsup:

There is a small resin figurine on my desk of a French crusading knight.It's been haunting me for a long time,glowering down at me. I've been promising the little fella that i'd '3D' him,so i did. halfway through i decided to change the concept and steered towards an amalgamation of the figurine and a Dwarven Hammerer. I completely modeled/textured two separate environments to situate the character in originally.But,i wasn't happy with either so i decided to pose him on a base in the style of a Warhammer miniature diorama.

Modeling:3dsMax-Render:MentalRay-Compwork:PS141

[PascalR]

:welcome:musashidan

Please try to upload your image again, it should work better now.

Cheers

Pascal

[PascalR]

Nice to see your render! Very nice lighting and textures, my only comment would on the finger plates, they look a bit too uniformely aligned imho. Oh and also the cape folds look too perfectly parallel for my taste.
Anyways, this looks really cool:thumbsup:

[musashidan]

Thanks for the crits Pascal. Yeh,i agree,it's only after you spend hours rendering, doing post and putting the image up on the net that you realise other changes you should have made. :) My own fault for not getting in the habit of WIP threads.......

thanks man.

[ZippZopp]

this is a cool piece for sure. i really like your metal shader, can you share some info on it?

[musashidan]

wow thanks Peter.Your comment means alot.Your work is incredible. :thumbsup:

The metal shader setup i adapted from a Neil Blevins technique. It's an A&D material with both texture maps and procedurals.
The metal shader is setup with the usual properties in the A&D material. It is then put in a blend material and procedural dirt is masked on. Any object that receives the metal uses a blended box map to project blended planar maps from 6 sides so there is no need for a UV unwrap.
A 2K tileable greyscale metal base texture(dents,scratches,etc) is created and used in the 6 slots of the blended box map map and dropped into the diffuse of the metal material.(same method for bump) then the root material is dropped into an MR multimap and many variations of the base metal colour can be achieved by dropping the variants into colour correction maps. So different metal hues can be set related to face ID's.
If the material is a painted metal then a procedural noise mask is used to "chip away paint" based on vertex colour selections to reveal another varient of the metal material.
Finally,to paint specific patterns or details the mesh can be printscreened from an orthographic view,painted in PS and re-projected back onto the mesh
through the blended box map.(sorry if the explanation is terrible)
then of course the HDR lighting/reflections do the rest!

I've found It a really great workflow(although it was head-scratching at times) that produces great results. I know you're using Maya but the technique in Max has been pretty much invented by Neil and i'm sure if you PM him at CGT he'll send you some info as he does mention it's more straightforward in Maya.

Thanks again.

[GregStrangis]

This looks great man! I can see this sitting on my desk for sure =)

[musashidan]

Thanks man. much appreciated.

[tonytrout]

Texture and shading is just great. I read your explanation of your settup in Max and my head hurts, but its certainly come out well:thumbsup:

[collings]

cool render man, dig the overall look :)

[PascalR]

Thanks for sharing your shading techniques, any shader tree screenshots?wireframes?
:thumbsup:
Cheers

Pascal

[musashidan]

Thank you for all the great comments.Highly appreciated. :thumbsup:

Here are some wires Pascal. And the looooooooonng shader tree. :D (it's late so excuse the bad PS stitch job on the shader screenshot)

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http://i644.photobucket.com/albums/uu167/musashidan/wires.jpg