Pushing Creatures Through the PIPE with Framestore VFX - ZBrush Summit 2018

hey hey how's it going so yeah oh just like today massive thank you to pixologic for having us yeah it's a real real honor to kind of come here and kind of meet everyone and hopefully present some work that you guys find entertaining as they research I'm Dan Tomas and Rishi and we are representing the modeling the effects modeling team from Framestore in London you know obviously this we're going to be talking about how he's dead brush to push our creatures through the pipe and the artwork which beautifully displays this bye bye Rishi yeah so we're just going to show about we're going to talk about how we use the brush throughout our pipeline to facilitate you know the the images that come out the other end we are of the three representatives of these beautiful people this is a modeling team in in London and the modeling team in in Montreal this is obviously just a fraction of the people that obviously make up any of our any of our work Framestore is currently running at about almost three thousand people across six locations we've been open since for about for over 30 years now obviously you can see behind you kind of our greatest hits I suppose we we are a multi-faceted media and media company we produce content for film TV advertising technical installations they are they are the list continues to get longer and longer but so what we're obviously here to talk about is our creature work and obviously to focus on that we're going to start by having a look at current creature real like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] quite good [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I [Music] I'm cool this is me we're gonna jump on that spaceship and get out of here wanna come [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you very much yeah so we will really want to kind of illustrate how we use ZBrush as part of the whole the whole pipe really or at least kind of how we support other departments from the modeling apartment you know we've got a kind of very simplified version of how we kind of ingest a an idea or a concept into into the modeling department you know this kind of plots of rough or be a very simplified version of like how how we kind of how we get a brief in and I would say like these are the areas we kind of we use ZBrush and these are the areas that kind of used to support all other departments are used to support using ZBrush but obviously it's not all we use it for you know we use it multiple departments obviously the kind of standard modeling work that we just kind of alluded to but you know scam cleanups prop modeling whole environment assets you know cleaning up lidar literally everything that you know most other packages won't open so we it it just facilitates our workflow across multiple areas I'm gonna quickly hang that hand over to Rishi and he's going to talk to you about some of the cool characters that we've created free cently hello guys this year so I'll be talking about these three creatures Atlas rocket and lagged off so you must have been already knowing that bagged office from infinity war like the cool villain and rocket is from guardians of galaxy even a BLISK so basically I'll be talking about how we use ZBrush in the whole process and at different stages you know it's not always that we keep sculpting from scratch or at what stages we pick up stuff to continue our work I'll be talking about that and maybe I'll if I have time I'll show quick demo on rockets nose possibly so let's start with embolus so zbrush ear was used for concept sculpting at this stage so this I was fortunate enough to work on this model from scratch you usually you won't get to work on any model on scratch like sometimes some other vendors give you to start with or you have some base mesh to start with but then this was started from a spear basically you can say that [Music] so this was the only concept art which was provided by the client and we had to start developing the creature from only this angle you know so I started with the simple spear in ZBrush and whenever I'd work on any concept I see to it that you know this is my personal preference different artists might have different ways of working but if I get a concept art I see to it that at the beginning of the stage I try to match it as close as possible blocking wise instead of you know thinking about the functionality or we have the joints and all the stuff because in the beginning I think for me it's very important that the design aspect is met instead of thinking too much about the functionality and atomy and all the stuff so design for me is a very important at the beginning of the stage because it's already approved so people like it so first match that so this was just a quick ZBrush pass maybe in a day or so you know trying to match exactly to the artwork and then from here on what we do is we show it to the swoops and then then the process of redesigning or maybe you know adding few other aspects starts where different departments start coming in like rigging texturing other guys would chip in their ideas ok this might not work all this might work and then we start adding our changes to the design but we see to it that we stick to the basic plan and don't deviate too much from the concept this were few of the references which were we had collected for a blurs some for the tentacles and then the primary reference was the mole rat it's on the screen right silence from me so the client always wanted to refer to this mole read which is like a three or four inch rat and we had to make like a hundred feet obelisk but then they wanted to you know get the essence of those wrinkles on his body on a bliss and even the color scheme and all those stuff and we also found this interesting creature like you must have seen on YouTube where it's called the goblin shark and the way it opens its mouth it's very interesting the way it snaps to its prey so we thought that can be a good inspiration for a blintz mouth there so the way we start is so I've shown you what I have sculpted in the beginning the blocking so if you see you see that yeah okay so this is what I have stopped in in the beginning and if you see to the one which is below it is from the previous Department so they might have already started you know started working on the previous realization where they put this model in front of the camera then start playing along with it and family I am working on this concept okay so what we do is if I if my proportions are kind of matching to the concept art then I'll try and contact those guys and get that base mesh which they are using for their previous so that you know it shouldn't be like we both are like doing something different proportion-wise so you get it and then i tipos them in ZBrush itself and see what are the major differences between the two model if there are then we discuss it out and sort it out but if there are not major changes we continue with the process so but this is a very important process important stage to see that the previous any concept kind of match and this might differ from character to character this is what I had to play around and then we make the poses of the model in ZBrush itself and then try to you know show it in dailies cloths oops how it's going to look in different angles like front side top view just to see how he feels the space and how it might look so this is like like a pre-production kind of stuff so which is very cool because usually in VFX you don't directly get stuff to work like that and then with this I started with the primary forms so once the blocking is done the primary forms are fine there then I start detailing so here you can see I've started adding some of the primary wrinkles around it but my core reference is still the mole-rat he's just looking at me we need to have my details on him at some stage and then we start adding the secondary details using I think I have written all the brush names you can always refer to that I love this brushes to use to get the detail stuff so this is kind of adding the secondary details and we try and avoid the tertiary details as far as possible in the VFX production of course it depends again from character to character but for this we kind of you know didn't do the tertiary details for this and the reason because is that sometimes the text shot is wants to do the tertiary details so that they can play around with the cavity maps and all those stuff with procedural methods so that might help because if you do lot of detailing like tertiary ones then if they want to add something extra it's sometimes become a bit difficult but yeah it's case to case then it's still in the ZBrush so you don't have to go to rigor or animation or anything you are still doing everything in ZBrush I'm trying to get this thing's uproot so like we make different poses and I try to read the scale how it works how big is the human in front of a blaze and how it might look holding it so we do all those exercises in ZBrush itself so we don't have to go out of the software which is great actually and I always find you know any reason to open my ZBrush so this is well one more of my daily submission where you know referring to the mole rat I have tried to add some of the wrinkles there we don't want to go very crazy in getting those wrinkles because we have to think about down the pipe and how it's going to affect all other departments like CFX or animation and all the stuff we just cannot go wow I'm going to do some crazy effects there and then certainly other departments come to you oh man what are you doing like we cannot get the CFX then it's going to be heavy it's like a hundred feet giant there so we have to think about that so it's always a good idea to you know keep communicating with other departments constantly and they all appear designed accordingly because you're a team working as a team basically so it's a collaboration it's very important that you keep communicating with every department when you're building this if it's a personal one it's fine but if it's in a production work you're affecting lot of different departments so you should always respect that and develop our designs based on you know different departments as well so this is the ibless mouth concepting where we were thinking it's the odd mouth there with like thousands of teeth lying inside I don't know how he manages it but then we this was just a concept and saying how I can pull the lips around give some gravity feel to it and make it asymmetrical give him some scars and stuff make him look cool as far as possible though he is like an space octopus and then we are still referring to a mole rat so no connection there but we have as an artist we have to make it work right so that's that's interesting and okay so this is I just play that can i yeah okay so it's too fast here but anyways the basic concept was like if we design something if it's always a good idea and since ZBrush can help doing animation like basic animation not animation actor but if you can you know scrub something nicely and then if you can layer them and position them in different layers you can always go to the timeline in ZBrush and you know keyframe at least 4 or 5 frames I was good enough and start animating it and then somebody's in your dailies that will help a lot to your soup because then he can start visualizing in a better way you know ok ok I can get it how it moves so that's nice you know so you're basically helping even your VFX OOP there to visualize very quickly and ZBrush is amazing for that because you are still in ZBrush we are not still out of ZBrush so that's one amazing you you're saving a lot of time there so yeah definitely I make it a point that in all my submissions or at least most of my submissions I animates you know at least few frames and show it to my soup and they definitely get happy about that and then we also use it for muscles system likes sometimes rigging they provide us with the basic muscle geometries because they actually place them on the bones and structure this is a very simple one because he has most of the tentacle around it but then Diggy was the base mesh for the muscles and then if it's needed we do tension shapes that too in ZBrush again the tension shapes for the muscles so basically if he's like flapping or like moving or flexing his muscles we know add bows blend shapes using ZBrush it's a stick-figure but it works sorry and then let's see some of the shorts for a blues so basically I showed you guys this in like six to ten frames but then this model took like six months you know a long process so yeah it's not that easy to you know because the thing is it keeps there it's basically evolving you know every day go to the dailies you know there are new commands new suggestions new ideas coming up and as a model of we have to be like really okay patient about that you know like we cannot just lose you know the artistic patients over there so we have to like okay fine it's fine if you can take your critics in a better way and start developing it it's definitely going in a right direction so yeah it took six months for this character to get over and I don't know why Drax ran into his mouth so this is a big turn of ablis these are the muscle systems all the lighting in rendering oh so yeah I think that's for the ablis if you have any questions just let me know or else I can move ahead with rocket fine it's your birthday isn't it come on man you're the mothership of all things creative Tim King ladies are gentle happy birthday thanks for being here I have a question regarding the collaboration so when it takes six months is that one artist that edits in zbrush or do you break out the ZBrush editing across people it depends basically I won't take the whole credit because I always believe that in VFX or any studios it's a team work always so it's very seldom that you know one person finishes from start to beginning even for Ellis I started with the concept but then I was moved to the other show for some other reasons and then my friend Leon like he started taking over from me and then I had to communicate you know where I left so it's like a relay race and then we help each other and we basically don't get attached to or basically if you get attached to you again then you know I'm losing my bliss no it's fine you're just helping your colleagues out there so while passing it over to him I explained him ok this is where I'm living and then you can continue it there and then of course after two months I think even he was again moved to I think baby Groot or something and then I have to take it back so it's a long process there that's right you know it it's like six months of processes but then there are a lot of artists involved but on this there are two artists like me and Leon till the end yeah we're gonna sing happy birthday that guy before the night's done never had so many people sing you have your birthday another hand popped up somewhere was there another hand oh my mistake anything can happen the lights are blinding carry on gentlemen sorry about that okay so rocket this was a great character like before I joined Framestore i watch the audience of galaxy 1 and I was really impressed to rock it all I wanted to work on this cat at some point but oh it's already done so okay whatever and then after a bliss I got a chance to work on rocket oh my god that's cool I'm going to get my hands on him he might get him dirty or whatever so when guardians well actually two came in they wanted a better structure to this character from the previous one it's not that the previous one was bad it was really good it was just how we improve from there so that's well again ZBrush comes into my mind again okay I have to pull this up anyhow to my super suffer okay so the VFX hoops had some ideas of what you know we need a structure to his silhouettes and his jaw structure make him more look mature because previously he was looking a bit younger so this is like old and new from front to use some side views so at first glance we might see they're quite similar but there are subtle changes and subtle changes make a lot of differences that's important okay and so this is the old rocket he looks cool but he has a bit of a babyish look they're slightly cuter one and then these are subtle changes which was made and then suddenly okay yeah so this changes which helped him look a bit mature and more raccoony so this was all done in ZBrush we just want to guess what move - nothing that was good enough for me like because in ZBrush I like the feel of the brush you can do it in maybe are the surface - with your sculpting tools but I like the feel about the move tool in ZBrush this is the whole rocket model of in the studio render and then this is his hand which I got to sculpt again because the previous model didn't have that much details and then with every sequels we stopped we improved the model a bit so we said ok we need need to add some details on his hand and then we end up putting black text on his hand which is fine I still get to sculpt and show you guys the gray model hi ok next move so the one last thing on this thing was the nose this was the old one this is the old one that was a new sorry I cannot play the slide stop earlier but basically they wanted and improved nose details there very quickly everyone wants everything very quickly right so we have to start planning in our mind how to use you brush in your batteries don't always have to do it from scratch so I'll show you maybe I'll give us quick demo on that and let's first play this video can you see the most details no but it's needed for the making of it is the Hat but yeah of course sometimes you know it's better to have details there we can always reduce it or whatever but you never know if you know he rocket decide to come in front of the screen and then you don't have details so you don't waste time there so sorry let me go to ZBrush and quickly you know many of you might already know it but I'll just show you what I have done on that so it was very quick thing sorry okay so this is just a general nose generic nose here which is kind of looking like raccoons nose let me subdivide this like this is not my UI so I'll have to just you know figure out after using you eyes it's so difficult to go to the default menu and okay where are the buttons there okay one more time cool so six times so basically I've cut down the model because you don't want to subdivide your whole model like seven six times you know it's going to be really heavy so you can have like a buffer to Touro polygons over here maybe and then cut it off and just use a displacement while rendering so what I did this for this thing was like they asked me to just edit it so what I thought okay I don't want to spend time in you know getting those details by hand and at the end it wouldn't look that great and they've given me a deadline of just a day or two to at least do something quickly so I said okay fine I just called up the texture artists okay can you give me a quick you know liner to up on the nose I will take it from there so basically I said it's a collaborative work right so let us do it I am still in ZBrush so that's fine so you give me the line art work so I have something similar to what he had given me let me go to the texture boat go to your texture map down where that texture map okay don't worry it's already flipped and and it has so yeah I'm not because it's just using this line so even the [Music] intensity so yeah so okay yeah because there is low intensity now this is the movie to come here back no wait sorry you guys sorry guys but you need to bear with me just get the idea so basically lower intensity run a smooth brush let me check again no you need to come in front I guess no ya see it moved okay cool so just run a quick smooth brush with the light intensity or else just to remove the jaggedness if it's there lying around that will be cool so you can see and then try to move your brush in circles so that you it doesn't become like an even surface there so once you do that what you can do is oh sorry I can brush my okay you can go to your clay buildup and if this mask is distracting you you mask okay it's gone so they're all distracting me so once it's done you can sorry guys I don't know somehow it's not behaving as I wanted but I think you get my point like you go to each of this individual tiles not each but maybe random ones and then sculpt on top of that and try to break up that flatness on his nose and always try to zoom out a bit because what happens is if you go too much into detail and start lobbing it everywhere it might look odd so you need to zoom it out and see how it reads well from a certain distance because he might not be so close every time so that's the basic gesture and basic idea which I ran and this was done in like half a day yeah possibly possibly right now okay okay but then we are running out of time yeah so basically digital clay ZBrush keep in mind that tomorrow evening this is unscripted this happens all the time tomorrow evening the ZBrush Awards are gonna be happening so that's you know really going to be an exciting time for everyone from around the globe as well as the people watching at home the sculpt off was another raging success Ryan Deiss we're gonna be announcing the winners ZBrush Awards are really really energized sort of evening to be a part of so if you can be back here on Saturday evening tomorrow miss mr. or mrs. Saturday night or mid Saturday night whoever be your because it's worth being here for and then there's always the traditional party that happens afterward if you're at home on the Twitter I mean I guess we could do like a FaceTime or something we can have a live feed from the parking lot live from the parking lot right hello again brought to you by Robert Mondavi is that cool he's making it work for you right yeah yeah and you know he was taking a vacation out there he's been you know conspicuous by his absence today maybe a notice that I was up here alone the whole time repeat offender so yeah the ZBrush Awards are gonna happen it's gonna be great if you can make it again tomorrow night really nice why don't we take this commercial time out and swing happy birthday to a longtime friend Tim King everybody do me a solid here we'll sing happy birthday to Tim King yeah anybody else have a birthday today because I'll be kind of cool oh yes there you are okay hey how you doing happy birthday okay so together will sing a nice zbrush community happy birthday actually before we do that I'd like to say that the community is so strong and I want to thank all of you for being here as well and tuning in around the world it's been a packed house all day long I'm sure it's gonna continue be packed for three days it's always a raging success it's always a pleasure to come back into the fold of the digital clay that I love to be here once a year and do this with you so let's I guess send them off into their new year with a nice diverse community welcome are you doing this okay ready okay so oh yeah oh yeah a selfie with everybody he's doing a selfie video do you want it are you in on this too yeah well get up here I mean if it's your birthday come up what's your name Emily liked the song right this is good yeah Emily okay here she comes what a courageous put a courageous person don't go too far we're doing a Happy Birthday give me one second okay get off here with Tim King and myself Emily and we're doing happy but I'm gonna sit down here and so I'm in the frame as well cuz it well I'm kind of you want me to do it yeah you do all right yeah hey how you doing happy birthday yeah okay so how do we do what is it a picture or video okay right can you hold that a secondary incision you just hold that like that right there okay right we're all gonna sing the Happy Birthday right okay one you faced the audience sure okay one two three happy birthday to you happy birthday to you happy birthday dear Emily and Tim happy birthday to [Music] wonderful yeah everybody okay and that's the way it's done folks for all the people at home on behalf of myself it's Tim can we take it back to the action let's go guys back to the classroom French tour thanks very much never had a zbrush birthday before you all got the point right just use the clear brush not every tile but random tiles try to pick up the flatness that's it you are done go show it to your soup you will be happy and then this is what we got from there of course the image is kind of pixelated so forgive me for that and that's more dragged off yeah okay so this was a character where we developed it from beginning I guess and [Music] this was one of the earlier concepts so the one on screen left yeah so this was the initial concept it was provided and then we started doing some exercises on building this and animating it and building a vignette which are renate which I will show you at the end of this black dog presentation and then this was the costume which came in later on which I'll show you again so this was the black dog model which me and Thomas worked together he was in the beginning of this show and then he sculpted a lot of the scales and stuff and then he had to move on to the show as I said before it's a team work basically so we are never attached to you know any of our models and we happily hand it over to the other modulus so it's a good practice do that and we'll be happy always so I took it over and at that point I think we worked for like few months and then I came over and then they wanted some proportion changes expression changes his horns and stuff so I worked on that so this is what I have worked after work Thomas held left one so if it's the front view okay and so this is the costume which we worked on blagged off and again I'm still in ZBrush I'm not talking about anything else so even for this this is like concepting quickly once the moral model is built let the body I did the mask on his body and extracted it GG mash it and it's some thickness using zmodeler or something and then you start using your sliced brush you know and and then you start using your panel loops get a design ready quickly add some folds and wrinkles that's it make a presentation nicely put your reference on the side show it to the soup it's happy and it studies it took like again like six months not not just the question but the whole model yeah it's just easy to show it on slides and okay this is this done but it takes time but yeah is always helpful so these are few other frames this is the shoulder armor off black Dorf so this is from my daily you know submissions which I have brought to show you guys you know how we submit in front of our soups so that they can have a look at it and discuss so and basically I'm not much of a hard surface guy I like to be more organic but you know one of my soups in my previous studio like he always used to tell me you know treat everything similar even if you want to do hard surface you know you can still have that organic feel to it so I have to walk on this boot so if you see this this part so this is what was provided in the beginning and then they said okay we want it we want this wood to look cool do whatever you want okay they said whatever so like we found this biker shoes and stuff I think it should be something like that and I said okay how do I do it's not embolus where I can do wrinkles and stuff okay go to google ask ZBrush that's cool and then you keeps answering all your questions and I started using this slice brush like I learned this in like a day and then started using sliced brushes and panel loops edge loops very quickly and I was amazed with the results like like in one or two days and I showed it to my soup again okay cool done and after this we take it to the software retopo it and get it ready for production so this was the side armer where we use slowly I think only one major tool was used here brush was used which was trim dynamic very quickly tap on your high res model and then give it a nice trim dynamic treatment to it and that's it it's done okay so this is the black tee off in grey with all its costume turntable and this is without clothes sorry so we keep testing this with renders and see how it looks how it displaces and stuff before we keep moving with the designs so this is still a Derrick's cut obj from ZBrush and test it out with turntables if it works or not the last renders this is with the texture in the indoor environment [Music] and endowed the environment and I think I have lots to speak but then we are like running a lot of sort of time so you know I'm cut it down but then yeah I think that's it for lagged off and my part I'll hand it over to ya [Applause] so this is the hey I'm Thomas I'm this is a vignette this was kind of new to Framestore so this kind of troubleshooting or testing a character if it's gonna work in the shots so you get some kind of concept art and you you don't have to finish it the production level but you still want to get it to a certain level I hope you enjoy it messy unfortunate doesn't have sound this is how we actually sold the characters of a client when we were kind of doing the character development before the next phase of the design came back and we had multiple characters like this and one I've seen for each of them is very interesting to work on them because it's fairly rapid not not like VFX in general you have to be quite quick but you are also so your results rather quickly in the in the shots so I that was quite cool very - yeah so I'm I'm here mainly to talk about Fenris from thor ragnarok and iran from fantastic this one and I I had the chance to work on both of them oh sure where the presentations come so we okay and though I think we can all agree they look fairly different actually from a modeling standpoint you had like a similar approach how to have to deal with them in a way where for Fenris you've got a 3d scan from the client and for Iran and you've gap you've got 2d 3d concept meaning 2d is always gonna overwrite 3d because they might use liquify in Photoshop or they might use additional details so that's the very latest the client so you just have to go with it and whatever you have in 3d that's just an addition if you can use it that's great but that's really just an extra for each of the character in in in order to speed up the presentation I compiled a small video so in that video you will see some shots from the movies if you haven't seen it and additionally you will have the concept art and some kind of asset renders after that for finish it's quite important because in the movie you only see it with the hair with the fur so it's kind of a good look why the video is running it doesn't have sound so I'm just going to talk about the kind of the challenges we had during a such creation and you can see some camera angles so we so very early on that we can have some close-ups of the face and also for the feet so we had to add a bit more detail than usual for a dog to sell the scale and and also with short for revenge through a couple of iterations with Fenris with short for you you don't necessarily see all the details but you definitely feel it if it's not there so as a modeler if you have the time just try to add it because it makes a difference this is the original 2d concept art but the scan we've got from the client kind of override that so we we mostly stick to the to the scan in terms of proportions anything you have from the client that that they saw previously that's very valuable to you as a modeler if you want to get anything approved basically because you can have certain ideas where to let's develop the character but ultimately it's their vision and you just have to make sure that you are meeting their expectations so can we go back into presentation mode just fr shifter thought all right they're with us the wrong button mm-hmm I feel spoiled you so this is the scan we received from the client and you might think it's very furry so what what's gonna do with this but actually it's fairly valuable even just picking a smooth brush and going over it you will see some nice forms in there if you have to hand sculpted it can take quite a bit of time and you don't always have time during production you have to be very clever and use every resource you have so as you can see this is just using this mid brush and you can see some certain spice because smooth brush is not changing the topology is just trying to smooth it with the latest ZBrush scott reus pro is actually quite cool for this because as you go over it it's going to smooth out the topology as well so it's it's extra fun if you if you have to deal with this kind of geometry I think ZBrush in general is quite good now in processing and handling difficult geometry it's not picky but it's got what but you are starting with and using dynamesh as you measure and all these kind of features are very useful in production for us we use it all the time even if you're not counting it's quite useful in itself but of course we all love to sculpt now this can impart favor it wasn't very useful for every part as you can see the face is quite interesting I believe they put something in his mouth so it's not exactly as now I think he's just being uncomfortable here even if you try to smooth it out you're not you are not getting a lot of information out of them out of the scan so luckily for me we had to start from zero for for the face so that was actually quite fun and before I show the next slide usually you clean up a scan and you get some previous topology from other shirts and put it on top of it because basically what happens is if you have a topology from a previous show they can start transferring data like textures or groom or different kinds of things that are very useful in production early on and it doesn't have to be perfect now usually what you get in the first couple of days you don't show it to anyone especially not to the client because it looks horrible so I think frames are very cool to allowing me to show you this because I think it's just objectively funny and you might think like maybe adding color it's gonna you know save the day or maybe not in this case we still love them it's it's alright and if you actually if you think about it this is the first couple of days so the body is not too bad just cleaning up the scan cautiously if you have a bigger form and it's all dirty you just you just try to smooth there the mass flow is should be fairly smooth and try to preserve the areas where is like a bony landmark or something if you are clever about it you can save quite a bit and so the body is not too bad of course from this point on your first priority is gonna be the face because it's not it's not very promising at the moment and this is going to be quite a bit of jump but just to show you some kind of details we we've got out of it at the end it's definitely a journey but it doesn't have to be very long as you can see we added quite a bit of detail on the face even there it's covered with fur the reason why is sometimes you have scarves and it can also change where the scars happen so you kind of uncover areas and you never know what's gonna happen so it's much better in production to be ready and add a little bit more detail than you would expect to see so you are safe this actual model doesn't have all the details in it but it still looks pretty cool in my opinion this is kind of halfway through the production there every department had put something in it and it I think this is my favorite stage in VFX where nothing is final but it's getting there you have a good feel for it and as you can see this is not the final asset it has a scar it's red eyes it is a different colour for the face and that's another takeaway during production an asset rarely stays consistent so it changes all the time also this face is quite peaceful and we we kept that element of Fenris because what we discover this with with dogs you know them so well almost everyone has one that you've read the facial expressions very well so the it's very useful to keep it neutral at the base and then add expressions on top rather than bake something in it that you don't need in every circumstance during production if it for every design change ideally you would get a concept art something like this what is happening they get a render from the asset and they do a paint over on top they get some textures they put it in Photoshop and and they play around with it and you don't always have to do a 3d version of it but sometimes if you get to the client they like it they might want to test it even though it's maybe it's not gonna make it to the movie but they would like to see experiment with the idea so in this case we just did a quick version of like a Scarface it looked cool but ultimately it's it was not what we were looking for this is another version where we try to better match the original concept in terms of contour and the face is more stylized the muscles are more pronounced the third for Fenris makes quite a bit of difference what i I've done I've got the groom from David Nelson who did an excellent job on the final piece and I just put it into action very dirty it's not very proper animatic boom artist but still it makes a difference you cannot talk with the client without having the fur and next up is going to be fairly rapid as well because we want to do some live demo if possible Iran bond was hugely challenging it was actually my first VFX job and the original concept was coming from wrong place while I'm talking I'm gonna start the video I highly respect Rob this I think he has an amazing style and he has a very good sense of volumes so I try to keep it as much as possible and with that in mind I think he mainly focused on the front view which works very well in the movie as well and maybe less on the side view you will see the concept art in this come compilation and here's a nice breakdown and with characters like this with hero SS it usually goes through braking and check with them if the joint locations are all right if sometimes you've built in muscles to see if it's gonna work for them especially for Iran and she had to do a lot of a lot of different things rolling on the back and running and being the Kiva's bead around and being kind and also threatening at the same time it's kind of difficult to achieve but I think the main designer is great so we try to keep it as much as possible you can see some final details here of course this again takes months to get here but the key was for Iran panty very texturing Department and the reason why is because she has a lot of big areas where there's not a lot happening in the original concept art it was quite tricky because overall you had this mutability but also in poly paint you could read some of the more rhino light detail so we try to find a good balance between you know whales and rhinos because she can also swim so for every character you kind of have to consider the environment that here she is they just love that nose that's gone again right here let me that's actually fine I'm gonna pick up the live demo damn so the working with with the texture Department is quite important and it was very important for Iran pand because on big surfaces you don't want to be always at least not me I don't want to rely on hand-painted details the reason why is because your mind is desperately trying to organize everything you do and when you try to make randomness that doesn't always work what I found is much better to get base texture and go from there and and take it as an inspiration and just going through the surface and be more fluid that way so in my little demo I will show you how I would do that in ZBrush but getting those nice textured details with noisemaker and also where to go from there noisemaker is quite useful if you if you sew texture artist working in Mari they use a lot of procedurals they like to mix them and that way you get a lot more detail than usual that you would get from simple texture files and and also you get a nice again a nice randomness you can achieve that in noisemaker and I will I will just show you a couple of noises that can be useful for that I feel you Rishi okay I can delete this so I'm gonna delete this noise but we had and what I like to do is just add bass level noise that's usually the most tricky one because that one you want everywhere to happen so what I like to do is go into here pick one procedural and turn off the mixing so I only want to see the noise plug noise from now and and play with that so if I pick the turbulence from the noise flight and just playing with the with the intensity you can get very different results so if you find something interesting you can further twiki you can get fairly fairly impressive details out of this by just dragging the curve around and once you've found something interesting you can also mix back the default noise change that size in separately also the the sharper your lines here in the curve panel the sharper the detail you get out of it it's quite quite useful to play with it I'm gonna just apply this noise it doesn't have to be perfect usually it's a bit less strong than what you've seen in a preview but that's alright I will just do another pass of detail actually so I like to put them on a layer just in case and just in order to blend them together manually the second noise I will use for the bottom section and the idea here is just to show how much difference you can get out of this plugin so I will use the poor annoying Nessie well as soon as you turn on the masking and you start playing with the values you can get some nice better and I am to it first I like to play with the focal for poor shift and then tweak the curves also if you you can you can get some nice additional details out of it this way I think it's pretty cool and if you think about it you can use this noise on the entire mesh so it's a much more playful way of working than just creating your office and just trying to hit your sweet spot in Photoshop and bringing it back and it doesn't work and do it again oops I'm gonna use to brush them I'm just going to use a different scale now there are many ways to mask with the noise maker one of them is just to use the mask feature so of course I'm gonna switch to a mask BAM Winston to try this empty not this is not the time to try this yeah pressure sensitivity would not not hurt in this situation it's alright the thing with masking is you get a nice real-time preview with this and of course you can again smooth it out so you can have nice transitions and if you are willing to use the morphe brush to kind of naturally with back the noise from zero you can use the masking for a different feature so for instance if I'm I'm gonna mask these regions and go into the noise plug may be smooth it down and you can use this magnify by mask feature so what I would do is you put the strength by mask to zero and then just use the magnifier so you can have a different scale there where your mask is happening now if you think about it that's quite hard to achieve in something like Mari so that's like multiple steps here in ZBrush that's quite interactive so that's just another very play with it that way you are losing the ability to mask with the mask feature but that's alright really you are there so you just applied sometimes applied twice it works and then you just turn off the layer store a morph target switch and then you can with the morphe brush just paint it back very wanted to happen and I don't know as I will I will show you is it's actually quite cool I use it all the time to to like break up certain surfaces maybe you just want to use it in certain areas to mix it with other noises I think with noisemaker in general the key is to mix your noises if you just try to use just one noise it's probably not gonna work for you but if you are willing to take the effort and you mix them at night nicely and use the masking and the magnification you can get quite cool results so the next one I'm gonna use simple marble and this one looks fairly interesting by default actually I'm gonna just delete the noise and start from zero just to have a nice start I'm gonna use the octaves feature just turn it up a little bit that way you can get a little bit more detail from start up and again I'm gonna use the mix to get rid of up the default noise and what I like to use with this one is first of all just this is basically for called shift what I like to do it manually and once you start playing with these values you can get some really nice details out of it and in a way this is kind of free if you if you set it up once you save the noise and you can bring it in anytime also you can pull back the default noise if you need more now these are different kind of noises I will just import the model which has all kind of different noises and I will explain how I would continue from there so if you are very lucky you have good texture artists you can get these kind of details out of the texture press we just use the displacement feature and you will start from here now as a modeler your job is to make it coherent to to make sure certain details pop and others are not that visible on the surface so it's kind of balancing the whole thing and making sure it as a sculpture it works so what I like to do especially as you can see this simple marble is used for some dry skin effect what I found is for every creature you've ever here or creature I'm gonna speed up a little bit every hero creature no matter what you have to detail certain parts like the nose or near the the nails the cloves so after Y you just get your own workflow what I like to do with the dry skin is use the slash brush which I'm sure many of you know / - this is really nice we had some layering so it goes from one direction to another so you can define your surface very well with the mouth yeah I love it it's fine it's fine it's my spot it's beautiful but this is you know it's kinda kind of the idea so you make sure every detail is flowing from one direction to another that way you can add layering and so that will be the right screen you can do that on the on the nails as well so I'm doing this and click yeah I mean should I try it here now and that's fine we have the mouse that's cool so it would use the same thing on the nails that way you have similar details and both parts and you kind of mash them together loop them it's going to make sure that they have the similar surface quality so it's nice and coherent so that fun if it is for the driving it looks horrible sorry I'm gonna use I'm gonna show you the end result soon and for all the other stuff I I really cannot show you the pressure sensitivity but I think the main takeaway is I would use brushes that don't destroy all the texture detail so I like to use the default brush deform soft brush or anything other than the clay brushes because you don't want any other detail you just want to push them around and maybe use the damn standard to just carving and pronounce certain parts I'm just gonna go to the final one so here what you can see this is all based on the texture it's really just balancing the the different kind of details so if you check around the nails this should be good for like the first path if you first pass if you do that on the whole creature you of course you're going to get feedback and you have to do many iterations but having something that quick is very very good for you in production you just have to be ready for iterations and have a flexible workflow with that in mind I would hand it over to Dan get to get I got to run the walk-on gauntlet all right so try and set up works any better marginally better cool yeah no it's fine I think I'm just gonna try it with the Cintiq and see if that works it's all good yes we did try and get back to this cool alright so one thing for him stories come fight I guess fairly famous for is creating creatures with character creating you know these the you know Paddington is a great example you know creatures that have a real kind of performance ability the reason behind that is because you know we have a exceptionally strong animation team we you know the modeling departments support that role by creating face shapes and creating you know the ability to create those performances it's a it's a huge feedback loop which goes on on and on and on you know until you know until they can't go on anymore basically we're always trying to refine always trying to add extra shapes extra fidelity extra options for animation to create individual areas of performance you know that most people we use of the facts the facial were acting action coding system just to break down the areas of the face that would create these moment movements the based on Anatomy when we've got digital doubles you know we've got direct reference so you know the really hero the really hero characters such as Doctor Strange a thought ago that we we kind of recreate fully digitally we have direct reference of facts scans sessions of you know Chris Hemsworth or Benedict Cumberbatch and then we will semi-automated Li create a representation on our default topology mesh of of their scan expressions and then we'll basically use their brush to kind of split them up at that point we then deliver them into the rig and then you know it's it's there's always clean there's always clean up with any kind of scan related tasks but you know it's kind of it's the kind of effort the best reference it's not wholly creative but managing how those different action units go together will create the best kind of quality of face shapes in the rig you know with Nikon fantastic beasts we had we start to kind of go move away from direct scan reference you know ron perlman was scanned and we had his facial performance but because of the proportions of the face changes and because of you know the way they wanted him to deliver a dialogue you know we'd be creating take Ron Perlman's shapes and add them onto now like you know the plane changes in his face are just crazy so we kind of have to like reman egde those you know we kind of a very base character will probably have 30 to 40 shapes you know you can go you can go as we can go up to kind of 250 plus which when it goes into the rig becomes kind of 500 shapes for the animators but you can see like there's some really nice kind of fleshiness that we've managed to retain from some of the school detail that we've managed to retain from the scan obviously it becomes more abstract there kind of further you go away from human you know we start to start to have to design we have to you know obviously that Apes have similar facial structure to us but similar you know lack of nose all that kind of stuff you know we get into the technical areas of face shapes where the face underneath will will basically do the same thing so we'll create a user default head topology we had a scanner Taika Waititi we did the same kind of session with him but then we've got the technical aspects of working at how the rocks sit on top and that kind of all that huge feedback loop becomes it can add in extra people you know effects rigging animation obviously and then we lose a nose but we're still trying to basically you can guess what he's saying we we try and stress test obviously the things that we think he's getting thing they're going to say and the expressions we think we're going to have you know we were fairly certain he was going to say I am great about fifty thousand times so you know why not test it we had the limitations of him being made of wood as well so you know the shapes had to had to take that into account from a technical point of view but then like every time you find out you you end up you know in a pose you never thought you'd get to and it breaks everything so you end up having to like come up with another creative solution about how to do that at that point I'm just going to pop into ZBrush quickly hopefully I can sort something out so we have ever since Tarzan Alexander Skarsgard to become a default man he's not really very default it's like you see the body of him is like everyone wishes they look like that so we you know every - every time we get scanning we basically fit this mesh this topology to that scan to that base and that becomes our what we call man see you know he's he's been through okay so he's being Benedict Cumberbatch he's been nyuk and he's also because he's a good sport he's been je from the modeling team because I didn't really feel comfortable pulling everyone else's face around he's a lovely guy so you know this is a kind of good most of the time would obviously be using scan data but you know every now and again we don't get that option so you know if I was to try and make Jai smile which doesn't happen very often you know I'd like to start there we go no I'm asking yeah it's no actual masking it's interesting awesome no nothing nothing is particularly working no I'm the can't mask which is a bit of a issue control yeah it's just basically one good time to maybe yeah I see a hand we crazy okay where we got you over there is that you what you say hang on a sec check check hey how's your evening so far it's a good enough chance to ask a question right down okay with you good thing they're trying to fix is the Windows pen and touch no we've repaired it a few times you just need to turn off the right-click twins there's two of these guys here Holy Smoke I'm just an I'm saying the Windows pen and touch they just need to go in the right click settings and uncheck the button now windows pin and touch it's in the control panel Thomas go to the control panel go to the windows pen and touch Tomas you fixed it no don't run away from that go to the control panel I'm gonna work with you on this Tomas go to the control panel I'm here in the audience I'm with the people now dance for diplomats dine with dignitaries so dreams of Libertines and Here I am just a man of the people at least he can mask now so because of the because we're using the facial action coding system I can you know I'm pretty confident that what I'm doing is you know based on muscle direction so if I kind of say like you know my zygomatic major is gonna come from here and I can basically just make him smile you know keep me in the vein of questions anybody have a question questions yes way in the rear Hey and then from that point it's kind of just a case of shifting stuff around I got a question for you in the back sorry you know I can quickly use those tools just to kind of try and create some kind of smile this is not working it's happy money I'm there for one second yeah I got a question for you to go hang on one second okay go ahead hi guys we're doing the creatures um for example I forgot the name of that creature but it was the large or I know like creature when you guys were split into pieces you said you use a poly buffer that's just for the non production model but for the sculpt like it's a buffer in between sections oh I have it now so that's a good question I have a personal preference of 50 million polygons if you have 50 million that's a fairly good amount of polygons to sculpt and to handle it's kind of a nice balance it doesn't have to be 50 you can use 40 or 60 whatever works for you but I find that on at least on these two characters if you cannot do it with 50 you can subdivide it but it's not going to help to your ultimately you should work with texture they should have a level of detail in the sure that you don't necessarily have in zbrush and that that is completely alright your job is to make it coherent so you don't need to have all the details in ZBrush at least not however the cool thing about frame stories they don't tell you what so first to use or how to Berkley exactly so it might vary from artist to artist yeah I think what Thomas is saying is right so basically I spoil your experience and every character will have a there are different obstacles and like for a bliss we had to subdivide it a lot because it's a huge character you need some close ups so we have to like cut off his tentacles subdivided more times and then extract displacement maps and render separately so yeah it depends upon character to character so every artist will have a different experience and then when we come to a new show like we share these experiences and come up with new ideas know what is the subdivision else has to be so we talk about it in the beginning of the show it's very important because if you don't talk about it and you just you know six months down the line everyone starts shouting at you so it's very important to get it sorted out in the beginning the subdivision levels also regarding the splitting up I mean I think every path you take has its advantages and disadvantages you can use HD geometry you can use the splitting up or if it's around 50 million ZBrush can handle it with 64 bit yep it's fine it's gonna be a little bit slow so you just have to take into account everything every circumstance you have and make a decision I usually split it up myself yeah yeah if you have more sub tools it's fine because it's 50 million perception so if you have like different parts you can still try and get into different sub tools with more subdued I think the main reason I split up is because ideally you at least seven hours a day and prepare for the dailies in the remaining one default it's a very ideal calculation but if you have to render your asset every time so it's not just save the whatever document you have but you actually have to render it like for instance with HD geometry that's gonna slow you down a little bit yes in the middle all right good to see it possible to reduce the subdivision levels and show the wireframe the poly frame on this or on your on this one I'm sorry yeah that is the base mesh okay so normally we'd actually do this on the lower res version just so we don't get that skin for the high frequency and we can kind of use smooth brush with a bit more abandon it usually takes like an iteration extra but we can get all the really nice broad movements however I thought just for the presentation purposes I try and keep all the detail in there just because it's a bit nicer you know my general preference is you know I go kind of big brush low intensity or half intensity and then and then just you know just kind of add like tiny little changes details you know so I'm kind of trying to get that bird's you saying like normally normally we'd do this on a probably two steps down resolution and that would kind of get signed off that would go through animation they'd kind of say it's so it's also so for us for our own sake so we don't get kind of tied up in the detail you know some of the wrinkles that you know you can't help but see in this resolution of mash and you just want kind of getting there and making the call you know that's for that's for later we kind of still have lots of discussions based on you know range you know how fleshy it feels that kind of things and actually just coming up with the shape in general itself you know designing that shape you kind of want to be a bit looser yeah if that answers your question yes oh sorry I just skip to one that I did earlier just because you know it made made a bit more sense what we're trying to do is as I say just try and try and kind of create nice bits of fleshiness you know one thing I kind of used quite intensively you can see his eyes shifting is a kind of mask mask bits out smooth them off and then you know in some and then just use them or slider you know obviously if I'm just cleaning out movement that's fine but actually if I go actually my my my my cheeks are moving a bit much and I would say yeah you do get comments like I think he's I think he's cheeks are moving like twenty percent you got okay cool twenty two percent too much sorted you know I can actually I can I can kind of visually see what I'm doing I like you know the morphe brush I kind of think is obviously very powerful but being able to judge it you know I'm always going kind of backwards and forwards and trying to judge where I'm actually at with it and you know I can see that I can see the visual feedback of the numbers and saying like okay it's 20% down you know run run the script just scrub the layer again you know I I wrote a very the only dead script I've ever written but it turns on my layer record without me having to go over here so just like when I'm doing like fast fast iteration feedback and then I'm just going to come over and start my start the layer record again it's massive improves my efficiency so yeah that's that's kind of a human head when I was going to get get to with the actual you know once we take the same process through to any of our creatures so Paddington Bagheera from Mowgli soon to be released hopefully again below we we kind of we take the facial action coding system we try and humanize it and once they go together once we've kind of created those shapes we we off we we often create like animal versions so you get animal blinks animal you know we they tend to have to behave like animals and like human and talk like humans so you kind of end up with multiple versions of the same shape and then all those shapes kind of go together and we try and create a little the phone ohms that allow the characters to speak you can actually see like we've got interpenetration between the teeth but your teeth in the lips but that's actually on purpose because we we kind of allow the teeth to push through them so in rigging we kind of set up a whole load of deformers so we don't actually have to worry about the teeth so that the deformers will actually push the lips away from away from the teeth and then you'll get a nice little kind of as the as the lip slides past as a lip slides past the tooth it'll actually kind of deform around it so as much as that looks a bit wrong you know it's kind of actually helps it the final the final product I was going to talk a bit about just how we used the last the last phase is kind of the last thing we do in modeling is kind of shot finding shot sculpting I was going to do a bit of a demo but I think that kind of the previously added in kind of an idea about what we the kind of things we add so like you know obviously intersections that aren't worth going back and fixing in rig or see effects we can quickly just sculpt out of will add in like muscle definition which you know may or not may not have come through in if it's a third creature you know kind of just some unique aspects of an animation we can kind of add contact add add extra expression you know lots of lots of stuff and it kind of makes sense to do that from a production point of view if it's only a unique event or it's kind of something that it's not worth going back through the entire pipeline to rectify or improve the same deal we kind of you know we add in add in some kind of extra muscle anatomy fixing you know you can see like little little bits here and there of subtle changes sometimes but you know just kind of fixing some Anatomy kind of adding a little bit of extra definition you know on the fly it kind of feels like you know reads fairly similarly but you know that when the lighting kicks in you know you'll see it with a bit more enhancement through a third you know through a groom yeah hopefully it's yeah it's basically like adding extra acting to to that to that creature we also obviously do it for Anatomy fixes and you know Anatomy acting they're giving us the hook man they've given me the hook I'm sorry this is this is the last light so it's gone oh yeah Oh almost the last slide I don't too much of them so we use it just to kind of really kind of highlight some anatomical features that maybe you only see a couple of times and that's the last that the assets team see of it until we see it in final shops so hopefully it does have sound yeah second embargo on selling for a moment [Music] give it up for frame saw everybody once again

Channel: Maxon ZBrush

Views: 28,438

Keywords: twitch, zbrush, zbrushlive, zbrush 2018, pixologic, framestore, vfx, movies, video games, dan moore, rishikesh nandlaskar, tamas kurdi, guardians of the galaxy, mavel

Id: umtXcHhmEzM

Length: 100min 20sec (6020 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 30 2018