Shiro San

Work in progress

Later on October, I started a project along with Brenda Casillas. We are working together to give life to a japanese macaque named Shiro San (aka Mr. White). Our goal is to make a photorealistic render that includes a character interacting in an environment. I'll be posting the progress of this project in here. Feel free to give us feedback or ask us anything on the comments or on facebook.

Layout

One of the first steps in our pipeline, was to roughly layout our scene in terms of animation and model proportions. I downloaded a CT scan of a japanese macaque skull which made the layout of the body and face a lot easier.

​Blocking

Brenda worked for three long weeks making the rig. She had some troubles with the rig, but we both manage to solve the problems when we got stuck. She finally started animating and here's a sample of the first blocking stage of our animation.

​Rough sketches

One of the steps I like to do when dealing with furry animals, is to place the fur as quickly as I can to get a feeling of the overall silhouette of the animal. I also like to do overpaints very soon before doing any major details on the sculpt and it also gives me a pretty good idea on how I can texture it later. I also handed in a partially retopologized model so that Brenda could start rigging it. 

Fur

At first, I layed out the fur on Zbrush, but as said before, it is for reference only. For the rendering, I am planning to use XGen. I decided to do some early tests to start getting a feel for the tool. 

​It took me around a week to figure out how to properly use XGen. At first, I thought that using the Interactive Groom from 2017 was gonna be super useful and I loved it, but I find that it is much easier to control the color of the fur with the old spline method. I did a lot of iterations for this one to test every single attribute. We are happy with what we have now. You will notice that the hands of Shiro aren't very well textured, this was on purpose just to save more time. We can always polish those later, but right now we want to start rendering to see how everything is going to look overall. 

​Texturing

I'm making the texturing part using Mari. I am using UDIMs to lay out the UV's just because I want to have the face separte from the rest of the body. I will use a 4k map for the face initially and will downres it if renders are too slow. For the rest of the body, I'm planning to use maximum 1k maps, since most of it is gonna be covered with fur anyway. I layed down some fine hairs in photoshop. So far, I've textured the face of Shiro using only fractals and some brushes from Mari. I also extracted a displacement map from ZBrush which I hand sculpted using the basic brushes. I'm thinking, I'll probably add more pores and skin detail... I'm doing the lookdev stage using an HDR and one light. I haven't done a proper turntable, but will do as soon as I'm finished with the fur. I am using alShaders for this project and everything is going to be rendered in Arnold and comped in Nuke. 

I didn't touch the texturing part much more since everything was already blocked out. I would go back and resculpt some of the details but for this particular shot that we are working, there's not even a close up for the face. So I'm calling the texturing done. I just did some final touches on the hue and saturation in some parts of the face. The shading part is the same, I'm happy with what I have now, but I know that I could make it look better, but I'm calling it done as well for now.

I wasn't totally happy with the specularity of the skin, so I decided to add more pore details.

​Here's the latest update for the fur and texture. I had to redo most of the fur since I wasn't happy with how the results were looking. This involved a lot of iterations and studying deeply how the Yeti system works and how to take advantage of all its features. 

​Environment

I textured the main trunk of the tree that Shiro is climbing and roughly placed the main branch. For this stage, we are doing several renders and trying different looks to lay out some ideas in terms of colors and background. We are trying to create a background that helps set a nice misterious cold mood.