Helirover & Pilot

Intro

3D modeling reel featuring a character and a vehicle, it is meant to demonstrate the ability to tackle both ends of the modeling spectrum. Demonstrate ability to model using Maya and Blender, sculpt using Zbrush, texture using Subslance Painter and present using Maya and Vray. I am responsible for all steps of production and scripting involved in the creation of those projects. I thank Fred Richards for high expectations, consistent mentorship and going beyond requirements.

Helirover in Depth

Maya, Blender and Substance Painter were the main software that I used when working on this project. Blender always seemed more capable when it comes to modeling, it has a very useful modifier stack that allows to work non-destructively, geometry nodes allow to create procedural presets and a good Python console to script plugins and tools. I was always aiming to present the project in Vray, as Maya is what I am expected to use professionally, additionally my mentor had no blender experience. All this motivated me to create a GoM, a blender to maya bridge that simply made a scene exportable to maya without any issues. It is by no means perfect, but it covers all modeling that I engaged in, handling any modifiers, curves, linked data objects and instances, as well as maintaining outliner hierarchy and naming convention. No matter how big my scene became, I was able to provide a clean Maya scene within minutes. At the end of the article, I will include a scripting section.

I noticed this concept in the first semester of my education, and even attempted to start working, but was convinced to wait until pre-mentoship/mentorship to tackle it. I had to make realistic compromises while working on this bahemoth; environment, driving animation, secondary copter, interior and sand simulations had to go, but that allowed me to allocate enough time to produce a character. I got very lucky as the concept artist portrayed a real helicopter and I was able to get plenty of image and video references.

I chose to split the project into 4 parts; helicopter, chassis, back and front wheel. As I was aiming to use Substance Painter, I did not want to make texturing difficult by giving it over 50 UDIMs in one go. I aimed to optimize my UDIMs and when space allowed it I was decreasing the resolution of textures but proportionally increasing island scales. Initially, I planned to have overlaying symmetrical/instanced UVs, but lastly turned away from that approach, hence the UDIM 1041 filled with nothing but bolts.

Geometry Nodes

While modeling anything one can find ways to automate, speed up or give user-friendly parameters to help the process, geometry nodes are a good medium for that. I have created a number of those for this project, geometry nodes aided paneling was the most useful.

-> Using easy flat geometry, create fully articulated paneling, with custom thickness, always correct normals, divisions on the side, controlled bevel and ability to remove the start/end side of the extrusion (that works with beveling). The last ability is important as it allows to clean up the meshes during and not after the fact, not creating topology that will not be visible, as well as simplify UVing as backend topology is gone already. Thanks to this technique I was able to finish the entire helicopter part in under 2 weeks, while keeping the entire surface/windows/wings as flat geometry. This works especially well when the flat geometry is live-wrapped onto a another mesh which is meant to hold shape.

-> Simple 2D array grid manipulation

-> Automatic random rotations along a local axis

Pilot in Depth

Working on this character, I started with an a-pose basemesh provided by the school, after adjusting it to the concept proportions, the rest was manually sculpted in Zbrush. Some elements of the concept were changed, my mentor and I agreed that it would be worth showing more variety rather than repetition. Working in a-pose allowed me to make use of symmetry as much as I could before I had to break it, to present I used a simple skeleton rig and tried different poses before settling on this one, after which I sculpted the final folds and details. My mentor provided me with some skin brushes and helped me find a good reference model, while working on the face I had no access to a 3D scan. Facial hair was made using ZBrush Fibermesh and clothing wool was made by taking guide curves from blender particle sim and putting them into Xgen.

The decision to make a character was made close to the end of pre-mentorship, when it became clear that the helirover would be finished about the same time as my mentorship was supposed to start. At the time I did not have much experience working on clothing, characters or anatomy. It was a risky endeavor, but my mentor and I agreed that a modeler should be able to do both, soft and hard. The pilot was picked partially because of initial hopes of creating the helirover interior and giving it a proper pilot and partially because of thick/covering clothing. It was limiting the amount of anatomy I would have to break my teeth against, as it wasn't clear how my skills will show themselves. This concept gave more than enough practice in manual clothing sculpture.

This project was to receive minimal texturing, just to slightly elevate it beyond clay renders. All of the texturing was achieved by tiling very simple textures of cloth patterns, leather patterns, metal scratches and so on. Some of those I made tilable in Substance Designer, some took from Substance Painter and some were made traditionally in Photoshop. The rest was about subtly changing the colors, roughness and specular values to hint at what material it is made of, often using simple noise maps to break up the reflections. 

-> Sculpt layers of the face

Scripting

The school program took 16 months, pre-mentorship and mentorship 8 months, working for that time made me accumulate a triple-digit number of scripts for various purposes, sometimes one-offs, sometimes not. Before starting my mentorship I realized that it would be way more convenient to assemble the ones I use most into a blender addon rather than remembering which ones do what, I would also need to make the scripts general purpose, meaning not break down if conditions slightly change. Rookies only allow to join snippets, it would not be a good medium to transfer an addon , so I will join a link to the repository. The addon is called SmartSelect, because I realized that the things that take the most time are those where I do the same operation onto tens or hundreds of objects, therefore an addon that offers different ways of finding the objects I am interested in would be most helpful. This addon includes the blender to maya organizer, see description. Since creating it I wrote more scripts, which I still need to integrate into the addon.

https://github.com/Sadgitarius/SmartSelect.git

Outro

Helirover took around 5 months to complete, the character took 4 months. I placed over 20 000 bolts into the helirover, if they are visible in viewport, opening that maya file will take 6 minutes. Saving takes 45 seconds. I appreciate you making it to the bottom of this article, here is a potato.