Dust Mite

Here goes, from the same germ-related project that brought you the sneeze (see below), a dust mite. Base mesh in 3ds max, detailed in Mudbox. Renders are straight up from max, no compositing, so it'll look prettier when it's done. :)



Now we know that when the artists for Quake or Doom 3 needed inspiration, they sought it in the organisms living off of their own dead flakes of skin. More coming up later.

Update:

Here's the shot. I rendered out the beauty pass, an Ambient Occlusion pass, faked Depth of Field with two fog renders (which I then used as masks to Lens Blur certain parts of the image), and comped in After Effects. Still working on getting some chromatic aberration on the edges of the "microscope" lens.

Tully Monster

The tully monster is the State Fossil of Illinois. It is also the subject of our new Blair Witch spoof film for a Geology and Paleontology science class. If you want more information about the tully monster, Google it.

Onward to my involvement in it. I'm creating the monster itself, the tully-beast, in 3ds max. Modeled, rigged, and animated by me. I'll outline the process here a bit.

Low poly was created in max. Detailed in Mudbox, exported as Displacement and Normal Map. Re-imported the new geometry into max, created texture maps (Diffuse, Bump, Self-Illumination, Transparency) in Photoshop using the Displacement map as a guide. Created morphs (including: eye blinks, breathing, jaw contractions, etc). Rigged and Skinned using standard max tools and bones (the primary rigging setup was using the spline IK solver to easier simulate "wormlike" movement). Created Custom Attributes to easier control bones and morphs. Finally, used Mesh Select and Noise to add some subtle, random wiggle and wobble in the fins (so it looks like wind or water is moving them) and the belly (bowels sloshing around).

** I should mention that I am NOT an animator, but I do enjoy pulling a project from start to finish and being able to call something my own. Therefore, even though I'm not really good at it and I probably couldn't make a living doing it, I do know basic rigging and animation.


Above image is a screen grab of my workspace. You can see the stack of my Tully model, and the Parameter collector holds all of my Custom Attributes.



Diffuse map and UV.


Two renders.




Several videos showing a very rough animation test (to test how the textures are working), and two previews showing the procedural "wiggle" that I spoke of earlier.

That's it for now. See ya on the flip side.