Thaheer Hassim - 3D Generalist

Sci-Fi Chase

This project was the most arduous project I had worked on during my time at gnomon. With the time I had, efficiency was key to getting this completed. The first thing I had to tackle was getting the camera work down first. Then I'd be able to only focus working on elements that will only be seen through the camera.

Soon after establishing the camera the next thing was to block out the vehicles and get the animation to look good. Once I was satisfied with the animation it was time to start creating the environment. I wanted to go for a futuristic sci fi feel with inspiration drawn from the Blade Runner film and the Cyberpunk video game. The main red vehicle I had modeled for a previous class, that I utilized for this animation, had fit the tone of some kind of rebellious biker trying to escape the cops. The concept was originally designed by Michael Kus. As for the police car, my primary references were police cars from the 70s specifically a 1977 Ford LTD LAPD police car. With that as a base I created my cyberpunk like police car.

As far as the set pieces go, I used a combination of third party I gathered on the internet and models made by me. Given the time I had, I determined it'd best that I use a third party asset for the city buildings. The free sample pack from kitbash 3D was perfect for the genre I was aiming for. However I did not use the model as is. I removed parts of the buildings windows and replaced it with a 3D project office room with each building having a different variation. This helped give it a more believable realistic feeling of a populated city. Furthermore I added billboards with different types of ads and cylindrical emissive lights to each building to emphasize the cyberpunk genre.

The foreground tunnel and roads were modeled by me, then I used megascan assets to further decorate the roads. Despite the motion blur covering up the the details I did not slack making sure it would look good even for a still image.

Below were low res test comps I had done to see if I was ready to move on to doing the final animation renders.

When it came to compositing I made sure to render out using light selections. With light selections this enabled me to have more flexibility in comp. For example, the slides below shows how I used light selections to rebuild my scene and make specific changes. Even though rebuilding a scene via light selections takes more time depending on how many lights are in the scene, I personally prefer this methodology over rebuilding the scene by adding the diffuse pass, the reflection pass, the gi pass etc. The ability to change the color and intensity of the light gives me more control and artistic direction in the compositing phase. 

I had also utilized render layers for this project. With it I was able to render separate foreground and background elements which helped me make changes to one layer without having it affect another layer in comp. It was as much as a necessity to use it for this animation as much as it was a time saver. Rendering one frame with no render layers would've taken at least 24 hours for one frame vs dividing it into different render layers allowing me to be more efficient, by rendering the different layers on multiple computers at my school.

Below you can see how I assembled the exterior shot via render layers.

As for the hover bike itself, this was a long, but fun vehicle to model. The main appeal was the futuristic design but with a style from the 70s. It's definitely one of my most proudest things I've modeled. The curvature of the vehicles was challenging, but I eventually found a way to make all the topology flow efficiently. For the internals of the bike, I utilized kitbash assets to fill up the empty spaces. Even though it is not seen enough because of the lighting, you can feel the complexity of the vehicles and believe its a functional hover bike.

Mech Animation

This project is my personal favorite. I'm a big fan of giant robots and mechs so doing one during my time at gnomon was a must. I came across the concept art for this mech made by Zuo Yi on art station a few terms before I started to model it. I began first by bring in the concept art into Maya and adjusted the scale of the image reference to be 12 ft tall. Afterwards I began blocking out the general shapes of the mech and focused on making sure I got the proportions correct. After that I started refining pieces of it until it matched the exact look of the concept. 

After I had finished modeling it I moved on to the texturing portion. At first I had gathered references of various tanks thinking that those types of textures might work well, but ended up looking too flat over all given most tanks have a very high roughness. What I ended up doing was actually looking at robots in films, primarily transformers because they were very convincing as being giant metal robots texturally. I used that as a base of reference, while still referring to some tank references because I still wanted it to give it a higher roughness.

When it came to the environment I discovered this concept art by Zhiyong Li that I thought was perfect in the aesthetic I wanted to create for this mech. However, given the short time I had I had to play it smart. So I created a several main pieces that occupied most of the scene and went for a moody lighting which worked in favor of my original goal while only seeing what I wanted the viewers to see. In addition I created another hero asset of mechanical arms, aside from the mech that would take up a majority of the scene. Without the mech in the scene these mechanical arms would be the main subject of the animation. 

I had a fun time modeling these mechanical arms. I utilized a few kit bash pieces to help add complexity to the model. I did some of the design process in Zbrush and then brought into Maya to retopologize. Afterwards I made sure to give the same treatment of textures as I did the mech. I added text and additional decal which helped provide a sense of scale to the scene.

Musicians Table

For the this project I wanted to show off my texturing skills as well as my knowledge in Houdini. After finishing my time at Gnomon I wanted to delve into Houdini and familiarize myself with the software and its rendering capabilities. Needless to say I will be incorporating Houdini into my future work from now on. For the render engine of choice I used the Karma engine. On top of being native to Houdini, I wanted to familiarize myself with it knowing that the USD support will become more widely used in the software.

I had modeled the violin during one of my modeling classes at Gnomon with plans in making a piece from it. I added the violin case to help fill up the scene and aid in propping up the violin to further show it as the main focal point. I gathered a lot of reference for the violin and the other props in the scenes. I wanted to make the violin look old and used, but not as if it's hundreds of years old from the point of view of the 21st century, but what an old violin would've looked like in the 1800s. To help show the time period I used warm light indicating the room is being lit from a fire place and a candle stick out of frame as well as some old spectacles on the table.  On top of using the old spectacles, I added a poster on the table to help emphasize the time as well as further push the story of a musician and his final performance.

It was a fun process using Houdini to iterate lighting process. The node based system allowed me to easily switch back and forth between my different lighting and scene set ups. Creating AOV passes and Light Selections were very straight forward to use. And Light Linking, which I don't often use, was very easy to use and further allowed me to get my desired lighting choice. Setting up the render passes  was a very nice process which made compositing in Nuke all the better.

Aston Martin Vulcan

This car was one of my earliest projects in terms of modeling. It was also one of my first attempts and modeling any sort of complex curvature. It was a real challenge for me but I learned a lot and enjoyed the process.

After opening the file, I noticed that there were some pieces that were not finished yet such as the brake calipers. Since it was a piece I was proud and wanted to use as my fourth demo reel piece, I finished modeling the remaining pieces and threw it into Unreal to make an animation from it. I really wanted to show off the curvature of the car so I went for a dramatic single light source moving along the car so you could really see and appreciate the design aspect of the actual car itself.

I already knew the render quality would be good using Unreal so I decided to use it for this project as well. It not only made for quick render times, but the real time rendering was extremely helpful in iterating camera angles and lighting choices. If I were to do this in a traditional path traced engine it would take a bit longer to view the image in IPR and thus limit my exploration of camera shots and lighting set up.

As a result I am quite happy with this piece. I love car designs in general so it was a fun project to tackle.