CGSociety Tutorial - Alessandro Baldasseroni
24 January 2008
Working at Blur Studio on the Hellgate: London cinematic, Alessandro Baldasseroni created the Hunter model. He tells all on CGSociety.
lessandro Baldasseroni is one of the most
prolific artists in the industry, submitting
works since the original Character Modeling d’artiste title, and the original ELEMENTAL Autodesk book. Alessandro submitted the Hellgate: London ‘Hunter’ image to Ballistic Publishing’s ‘EXOTIQUE 3’ last year. The Hunter model was made for the Hellgate:London cinematic, made by Blur Studio Inc. The Hellgate: London game was created and developed by Flagship Studio.
After my time in the production deadline, I decided to make an illustration for my own education, using some additional models I had done previously. I tried to stay as close as possible to the given references. This was started as a three-quarter angle sketch depicting the main proportions. Not having a heavily detailed sketch is good for me, since there is room to add more personal touches. I feel this pushes the artist in me to figure out visual and mechanic detailing solutions, while keeping the overall feeling unaltered.
I immediately recognized three kinds of elements I had to deal with. A generic male body covered with a dark grey undersuit; a dark blue light rubber armour and a metallic light blue heavy armour. My modeling workflow was basically bounded to these priorities. The figure sets the proportions, and then it is covered with armor plates.
Due to some other tight deadlines, and also because the body has not that very specific anatomic definition, I took a generic male model and started changing his proportions with a free form deformation box and soft selections. I left the facial features and most of the muscle definition undefined, because those parts were supposed to be covered by the armour. The Soft Selection is an extremely valuable tool for quick tweaking of proportions. Just be sure to flag also ‘edge distance’ with an appropriate value into its rollout to have a very localized control of the fall-off.
As you can notice in the stack figure, I also make use of the Symmetry Modifier during the modeling process, and TurboSmooth with two levels of subdivision, constantly at the top of the stack. Assigning a short cut to the ‘show end result on/off’ button you can easily model at step zero and immediately see the overall smoothed result by pressing a button (I use the space bar, for example).
Once I’m satisfied with the general proportions of the body under the armor, it’s time to begin covering it with the metal plaques. Of course, the dark blue ones first, since they’re the closest to the body, then the light blue ones.
No special techniques here. Once again the modeling is in subdivision with the very same stack as above. I usually start with a single quad, then Extrude edges all around, trying to stay close in volumes and shapes to the given reference. In a lot of the meshes, you need to make sure the volumes and shapes are solid, keeping an eye to not go too far from the underneath of the body.
When I’m satisfied with the general volume, I just try to develop a good quad topology of the main volumes. Of course the topology is done to take a count of the main cuts and holes, but the rest can be easily done with a normal map or a bump map. You need to decide how much detail is worth modeling and what can be put into a bump map.
I usually adopt a ‘rule of thumb’ that means if something looks tricky to carve or extrude into an existing geometry, I usually put it into a Normal Map. When you make something for production you don’t usually have time to model everything, so you need to set priorities.
As you can see in the picture a lot of cuts are not currently modeled, they are done with a bump map. So basically all the modeling followed this workflow, most of the detailing as you can see has been left to my imagination, which was a lot of fun! After modeling all the armor I modeled some folds in subdivision, just in those areas where they were more visible like the middle of the arms and the back of the knees.
The presentation renderings are done in mental ray. The material is a simple mental ray SSS Fast Skin material while the lighting a couple of photometric area lights and a back omni light with ‘final gather’ on.
lessandro Baldasseroni is one of the most
prolific artists in the industry, submitting
works since the original Character Modeling d’artiste title, and the original ELEMENTAL Autodesk book. Alessandro submitted the Hellgate: London ‘Hunter’ image to Ballistic Publishing’s ‘EXOTIQUE 3’ last year. The Hunter model was made for the Hellgate:London cinematic, made by Blur Studio Inc. The Hellgate: London game was created and developed by Flagship Studio.
