Monday 7 July 2014

Constructing the focal point, blocking out the floor.


Over the weekend, I focussed on putting together a sculpt of the Statue of Liberty's head. Starting with a base-mesh, I re-topologised the model using this guide, pushing and pulling it around until I had something I was happy with. As mainly a Environments/Props guy, doing facial stuff was hugely difficult. I managed to sculpt the statue to a degree that would atleast, when converted to a wire-frame view, resemble the statue's head.
Playing around with some ideas..

An ex-colleague suggested that looking into some kind of point-cloud data effect could provide an even more high tech look to the exhibit. After decimating my sculpt, I used the lattice modifier in Max to create geometry from the model's vertices, allowing me to bake out textures from the model. I then put together a fairly complex shader (it will need some optimization before I'm done..) that would allow me to use a very dense point cloud texture in the areas of occlusion (it stands to reason that these area's would be the most dense) and a less dense texture in the areas that are not occluded. I then used a camera-depth shader to allow me to increase and decrease the amount of vertices shown depending on the player/camera's distance from the head. At a great distance, the head would simply resemble a cloud of points, and up-close it would have much more fidelity.
In retrospect, I think I might invert the depth node, as the points look noisy at a distance. 


An example of point-cloud-data. 

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