Michael Rew's Art Blog

My brain made me do it.

[michaelrew]

Hi Michael! Thank you for the videos, those have help me a lot. I am from Colombia and i am working on my degrees short film. Could you make a video rendering stylized trees such as this short: CGI 3D Animated Short HD: "Chivalry is Dead" - by NCCA Bournemouth University and again thank you so much. (excuse my english)

Hey thanks for the question - I’m looking at doing a bunch of different tutorials on how to render specific objects I’ll add this one to the list, might be able to get it out some time in December perhaps. Also your English is near perfect so no need to apologise!

[michaelrew]

Batch Rendering Animation

Did a quick little tutorial on how to batch render a turn table animation with Renderman.

[michaelrew]

New Channel Art

While working on new tutorials and things I decided to take a break and render a pose. Forgot to subdivide the model so will have to fix that at some stage. This is now the channel art for my youtube channel which is http://www.youtube.com/c/smallrobotstudio 

Modelled in zBrush, Painted in 3D Coat, scene and lights with Maya and rendered with Renderman 20.

[michaelrew]

Renderman Grass Tutorial

Have been meaning to do this one for a while and it was a nice opportunity for me to render up a scene that I had in mind. Check out the tutorial below:

And here’s the render from the video:

[michaelrew]

Renderman Clouds

I’m in the process of creating a 3 part series on creating and rendering clouds for Renderman in Maya & zBrush. Check out the first two parts on my youtube channel or watch them below!

[michaelrew]

So many new tutorials!

I’ve made many a video in the last 2 weeks, check some of them out below!

[michaelrew]

Renderman 20 EnvLight tutorial

Just finished uploading a fresh tutorial on how to create environment lights in with Renderman 20 for Maya, apply things like HDRI’s and a few tips for lighting your scenes.

Here’s the image from the tutorial:

[michaelrew]

Can you point me to a good resource about installing Renderman for Maya (and getting it working) Thanks

Are you trying to install for Maya 2016? There are two versions, one for 2016 and one for 2016.5 - make sure you’ve got the right one! Otherwise I just downloaded the installer and let it do it’s thing, make sure you have admin privileges as it installs to Program Files (not x86 just regular) and then make sure you enable it in your plugins preferences.

Unfortunately due to the nature of PC’s being wildly different from each other it’d be difficult for me to trouble shoot any further sorry.

[michaelrew]

More Tutorials

Made some tutorials in the past couple of weeks, liked sharing some tricks for specular maps that I discovered:

And came across Amaan Akram’s aaOcean shader for Renderman which has been brilliant, I’m working on a couple of pieces that use it at the moment:

[michaelrew]

Exporting displacement maps from zBrush to Maya for Renderman

I really wish there was a shorter way to title this tutorial but oh well. Still working on this render should be finished by the end of the week along with another tutorial, stay tuned.

[michaelrew]

Marschner Hair Shader Tutorial

I made another tutorial this weekend, this time for the Marschner Hair Shader in Renderman. It’s a great little shader once you know what all the crazy sliders do, I run them down in this tutorial and show rendered examples and settings to help get you on your way to better hair and fur!

[michaelrew]

Furry guy MarschnerHair Shader iterations

Spent an hour or so playing with the Marschner Hair shader for Renderman this afternoon working on getting better specularity and saturation from the UV applied to it. The shader is really powerful but also a little unwieldy at first - I think after becoming a bit more familiar with how to control it I’ll end up doing a tutorial focused solely on controlling it for your renders.

Here’s the tutorial on how to apply a UV map to your xgen fur that I just made as well:

[michaelrew]

Depth of Field in Maya

Been going a bit mad on tutorials recently, helps me retain knowledge to say it out loud. Here’s a short tutorial on how to set up your cameras with depth of field in Maya for Renderman. It’s a little tricky to remember till you’ve done it a few times (and even then I refer to my notes every now and then!).

[michaelrew]

Throm the Barbarian

So here’s a character I just modeled from the podcast Tales from the Tavern. He’s a cool barbarian that does not give a @#$%. If you for some strange reason HAVEN’T heard TFTT you should take yourself over to iTunes and subscribe!

I’m really into those cool Disney Infinity characters at the moment so wanted to do something pretty stylized and low poly-ish. He as a lot of fun to model and I’m pretty happy wit the result. Would love to 3D print this guy at some stage.

Don’t think I’ll have time to UV him for now I didn’t even do a studio set up for this render like I normally do but an HDRI map is still kind of fun every now and then.

[michaelrew]

Renderman Atmospheric Lighting Tutorial

I made a video on the weekend showing two quick and easy processes I use in Maya to render atmospheric/volumetric lighting with Renderman. Check it out below!

[michaelrew]

Old guy and Subsurface Scattering Tutorial

Have been working on this guy for the last week or so, got me thinking about subsurface scattering and how it’s sort of difficult to figure out so I decided to make another tutorial for youtube. Also, thanks to Sydni Gregg I actually iterated a lot further on my initial sculpt and I’m happy I did because I think it looks a lot closer to what I wanted!

Here’s my initial sculpt which is a lot closer to the base mesh and a lot more stylised:

You can see that I adjusted the lips to be less feminine, added a lot more wrinkles and posed the face which made a huge difference in the final I think. I’ll be keeping all this in mind for future sculpts that’s for sure!

[michaelrew]

Sword Kid

So about a year or so ago I painted this character design of a kid with sword and came up with a little story about him. 

(I adjusted his height a little for reference as he used to be a bit shorter hense the weird looking legs!)

I’d just started learning zBrush and decided to try modelling him. I was not entirely successful...

https://www.instagram.com/p/1mjBqxE9WW/?taken-by=smallrobotstudio

Granted I had no idea what I was doing in zBrush and had never really modelled anything before. So, y’kno.

Anyway about 2 weeks ago I started Matt Thorup’s Advanced character Design zBrush tutorial and it actually blew me away. Since completing it I’ve used his work flow to model a couple of different characters and it’s the best work flow I’ve seen used so far. Here’s a couple of early shots of the WIP.

You can also see I’ve taken the helmet off - I wanted to show of the head modelling in the final render and the helmet was obscuring his face almost entirely so I decided to go without. Also it was a paint to get him to hold the sword with that big helmet in the way!