Making of Gladiator

This artwork created for CGArena 3d challenge where the Artist (Christopher ADAJAR, Paris) won the second prize. This is the first contest where he joined and his first published artwork since he started working as a 3D & Visual Effects Artist.

Hello, this artwork created for CGArena 3d challenge where I won the second prize. This is the first contest where I joined and my first published artwork since I’ve started working as a 3D & Visual Effects Artist.

It took me a while like two years by developing my skills in doing 3D before I convinced myself to embrace and use it as my day to day activities. After that I found out that once you get into it, it’s difficult to back-out. Let me share my experience with you the best that I can during the process of this artwork.

Maya 2008 was the primary software I used by building the entire scene and Photoshop helps me a lot in compositing the rendered layers and of course After Effects gives me the opportunity by adding a preset effects like grains, light color enhancement, epical environment mood etc.....mainly composite my Zdepth pass with a high levels of control.

The first time I read about the challenge and having a theme ‘Ancient Time’ I was pretty sure that I will go on with the Gladiator concept, not just its ancient look, it is because I am a big fun of Gladiator movie and that was the key of making me very inspired with this challenge.

Render Passes

Here is the breakdown how I rendered the main characters using separate render passes, it’s always a good idea by rendering your image in layers its allowing your machine to handle the files and preparing your scene for an easy color adjustment with any compositing software you want. 

This techniques has been applied to my entire scene, it’s pretty obvious that large scene is always advisable to break into a manageable chunks.

Note:
In order to get your shots into where they should be, once your entire scene has been set-up, make a separate file for your lights and camera set-up which is the one that you are going to import in each scene layers. 

Blend Shapes

From these 3 basic shapes, you can achieve a decent numbers of facial expressions by adjusting the blend shapes 1, 2 and 3 correspond on each faces figures. The tricky part is getting all these shapes to transition properly from one shape to another (that’s only if you will apply it into the animation).

I made this face Blend Shapes to my character but its pity that it was not used because at the end I decided to give the Gladiator face expressions as what is shown on my final image, something a bit calm and not very exaggerated because it’s obvious he won the battle.







Render Passes






Duplicate Instance

This is the techniques I used for building the coliseum; First I build the separate pieces and position it as shown in the picture below, then I used Duplicate Instance and give the precise value to the duplicated geometry by adjusting the Rotate Y Value and by doing that it will give you a sequence of rotated instance geometry as shown in the picture below.

Note:
Make sure every single pieces of your geometry’s pivot is positioned in the middle and your geometry has a textures applied to it before duplicating.

Building the Tiger

This character (Tiger) adds some interest in my scene I believed. I know that there is lots of work to be done still, maybe I just did not have enough time to elaborate a lot more and considering that there we're so many elements in my scene that I need to take care about.

To be honest it was a little bit late when I got the idea by adding this character during the process of my scene, I was hesitating during that time because I know that doing a believable tiger is not an easy task, but still I tried my best....lol

The trickiest part that I encountered in this character was building the fur which has been done using Paint Effects in Maya; it gives me a lot of frustrations because I could not get it right in the beginning, my computer always crashing every time I put a stroke using hair brush effect. I told myself I should upgrade my software to Maya Unlimited. 







Texturing

There are few of the textures that I used in the scene.

Sub-surface Scattering

When it comes to texturing a human skin, I commonly rely on using sub-surface scattering. This is one of the great feature of Maya that can accurately simulates any objects like human skin, candles, semi transparent materials, ceramic etc. anything that requires sub-illuminations from any light source.

Under the mental ray section of your material attributes, encircled is the three attributes that you need to play on with, always remember that the scatter color is base on the object that you want to simulate. 

Note:
Scatter radius and scatter limit is always depending on how big your scene is and how far you’re light can travel trough the object. Tweaking the values from your actual light set-up will help you a lot

Particle Instancing

Initially, I created a CV curve with a precise numbers of vertexes which will be the number of characters that I want to appear. Then Create emitter, emit from object

First select the characters in order, then go to particle, particle instancer; with default settings, hit create.

Then hit play from the timeline to reveal the particles with instanced characters, but as you can see for the figure it shows only one character, go to particle attribute and add new attribute per particle.

Make creation expression as shown in figure will give a random placement of your instance.

Go to instancer and select custom index. Custom index is basically the name given to your instance by selecting that, will tell Maya to select your instance randomly.

After selecting custom index, hit play from the animation timeline. It reveals the randomized characters. This process was repeated to fill my coliseum with the crowd.

I used the dust particles to give my shot a volumetric kind of dusty atmosphere around as well as the smoke particles coming out from the giant torch above the coliseum gate.

The effect was basically created using sprites particles with few expressions attached to control the behavior and accurately adjust it the way you want. Maya has a default sequence of smoke that you can found in the tutorials and extras DVD included when you buy the software. That was the image sequence I used for mapping the sprites.

Depth of Field

There are plenty of ways by creating a ZDepth Pass in Maya like; DOF rendering which is not advisable to use, render layers with use of preset luminance depth so on so forth.

This is the technique I used, first - I created a simple Surface Shader material and change the color into solid white, then I assign it to all the geometry in my scene.

Then the next step is I opened my render view settings and turn-on the Environment Fog.

Then on my fog node I turn the color into solid black and un-check Colour Based Transparency because if CBT is on you will have no fog in your render.

The beauty of using this techniques is you can fine tune your ZDepth which you would not be able to do if you use Maya’s native zdepth in addition to that, you can have a freedom by adjusting your zdepth value with Saturation Distance, giving a higher value will make your shot higher focus and lowering the value will give you lower focus on a distance.

‘This technique can save your time a lot; imagine my entire scene took 3 seconds to render.

Note:
The saturation distance value is always based on how big your scene is.

Compositing

Finally, I gathered all my rendered images and composite using After Effects, there are several Preset Effects that I used like; FMP Enhance Warm, Grain, Plug-ins from Frischluft which is very powerfull by adding your Zdepth pass. If anyone of you is interested with after effects there are plenty of free tutorials and preset that can be found in videocoPilot.net

Note:
This is a summary explanation of the 'Making of Gladiator' the entire scene is absolutely bigger than what I have shared by doing these illustrations. Okay guys, I hope there is something in this making that helps you in your project and hope you like it. Thanks to cgarena for giving me the opportunity.