Volume 2: Designing with Photoshop, XSI and
Deep Paint  Introduction I dont know if it actually exists,
but a friend once told me of a book A Bonsai Can Live A Hundred
Years, But Not In Your House. Watching Gnomon videos reminds me
of this erstwhile introduction to miniature arborist techniques:
amazing to watch, there are impressive things that you can learn,
but if you actually try to do it that way yourself, well, youre
going to kill plenty of trees. Aaron
Sims is a professional concept artist, and when you're watching
him work, you're seeing "the best." The value of the Gnomon videos,
which document the workflow of stellar artists, is not that Ill
learn to do exactly what guys like Aaron, Feng Zhu, and Ryan Church
can do, because thats not a realistic expectation. What I always
get out of these videos are new ideas about whats important in
composition and design, what to spend time on and whats not
that important. The CD The CD is a high quality
production, with excellent sound and screen capture. I tested it on
a Mac Powerbook and a desktop WinXP system, and it played easily on
both.
Aaron sketches in Photoshop
The first chapter of the CD, where Aaron sketches a creature,
freehand, in 3/4 profile is awesome to watch, but unlikely to be
replicated by any but the most experienced artists. Having seen
other, lesser, lights do sketch work for modeling, the more common
practice is to draw two orthographic views, front and full profile,
usually with guides to allow you to line up feature points from one
view to the other. Drawing in 3/4 profile is always a challenge,
even for normal human heads, because the visible area of the far
cheek and eye will vary depending on very subtle differences in
anatomy. You have to have a tremendous spatial intuition to do this
well. Aaron Sims clearly does. Its great fun to watch him as he
tears through Photoshop sketching away. With the exception of the
Liquify tool, which he uses a great deal, theres nothing in this
video that wouldnt apply to Painter, Paint Shop Pro, Corel
Photopaint, or the GIMP, though a pressure sensitive tablet is
clearly essential.
Aaron models in XSI
Aaron loads his sketch image into an XSI viewport. Already, hes
far a field of techniques Im familiar with (I learned to sketch
front and side views, set them as backgrounds in front and side
viewports, with care that features line up in the right places, and
then build your model around feature points visible in each view).
Aaron doesnt really use his sketch as anything more than
inspiration for the model, and models using just one perspective
view. He does another surprising thing: grabs a stock XSI human
head model and loads it in as his base model. Given the elongated,
odd anatomy of his creature sketch, Id never have thought of doing
this; Ill detail an existing head model, but to push, pull and
stretch it into another shape never occurred to me as a realistic
possibility. Most of the modeling that Aaron does is with XSIs
Perspective Modeling tool, which corresponds (roughly) to
soft selections in 3D Studio Max, or the Magnet tool in Lightwave.
Users of Maya or Modo wont have any difficulty, in adapting these
techniques to their application; even Posers limited modeling
toolset would enable a skilled artist to replicate some of
what Aaron does. Skill is the issue. Aaron sculpts his head,
using a small number of tools, and in a single perspective view,
which he continuously adjusts. The experience of watching this (and
playback is accelerated for reasons of time), is like watching a
great sculptor attack a hunk of clay, cutting, adding, pushing and
twisting, all in accordance with a profound understanding of shape
and form. This isnt complex from the point of view of the
software, but very few folks will be able to twist an existing head
into a new shape with just one 2D view for a reference. It is
possible for less gifted artists to do work of this kind, but the
techniques will be a little different.
Texturing in Deep Paint and Photoshop
After applying UV coordinates in XSI, Aaron jumps into Deep Paint
and Photoshop to build textures. Frankly, the Deep Paint section is
largely unnecessary; its a neat program, with a lot of powerful
stuff, though in my experience slow with large models. In this CD,
very little use is made of the more advanced capabilities of Deep
Paint, and one could play along with the tutorial without any 3D
paint, a nicely laid out UV map is all that you really need. The
first texturing step that he takes is really one of those great
ideas that you can take away from this CD and apply to your own
work: he takes a reference photo of rhinoceros skin, and tweaks,
clones, and distorts it to fit his UV map. This very simple idea
start with a good quality life texture for your creatures is
worth taking notes on. Aaron adds the useful point, that having
lifted a texture from a specific source, youve then got to tweak
and modify it so that it doesnt look like that source anymore.
Which he does, by altering hue and scale. Hes also tremendously
skilled at using other noisy textures (in this case, a stipple
brush) to blend the edges and seams of his source materials. Great
technique, again, one that comes from fine art training, here
applied to 3D. Having done all this for the head, Aaron then does
the same process for the body, which he then joins to the head.
Accessories
Watching Aaron whip up a spear, columns and a platform, underlines
one of the lessons of the pros do as little modeling as you can.
His intuition regarding how much geometry he needs is exquisite,
crafting simple forms on which to hang complex textures. Cloth is
one of the very few advanced features of XSI software that
he employs, to make a cloak, which drapes naturally. Again, this
soft dynamics could be easily done in many other applications,
including Posers Cloth Room, so though the specifics are XSI, the
technique has broad application. Rigging Probably the only
application-specific aspect of this tutorial is the rigging, which
is rather closely bound to XSI. Here Sims choice to work from an
existing model, rather than from scratch, pays off in a simplified
process part names, and rigging are already assigned.
Postwork
This section will be of a lot of value to Poser users. Aaron takes
his renders and tweaks them in Photoshop, particularly detailing
the creature armor. Its something that could have been done in the
modeling process, but like everything else Sims does, theres an
artist at work here, and the interactivity of sketching in shadows
in Photoshop clearly helps the creative process. Conclusion
Like other Gnomon videos, this will challenge and teach you, but it
is not a cookbook tutorial. I wish that I had the fine arts
skills to replicate the workflow demonstrated, but I dont, and yet
still find it useful, as would others. That bonsai may not live a
hundred years in my house, but its still nice to have.
 A special "thank you" to contributing columnist, artist,
Alexander Polsky [crocodilian], for taking
time out of his busy schedule to be a part of our writing team this
week. We invite you to view crocodilian's Gallery |
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