After seeing Jacques latest Modo effort, we decided we had to catch up with him to gain a little insight into the creation process for his awesome works.
Hi Jacques, thanks very much for agreeing to chat with us. Looking through your portfolio, it's immediately apparent that one of your great strengths is organic characters - is this something you consciously chose to develop your skills in?
Yes, this is the main reason but also because I've always been inspired more by organic modeling. The thing about characters is that to make it look good, it can be very, very challenging. In fact, I think that if any detail is wrong, the end result will greatly suffer and the audience won't get fooled. There's no room for mistakes, especially for human. My personal theory is if you can develop your modeling, texturing, shading, lighting and most importantly observation skills to do a believable character or even creature, you could almost do anything in CG that would look right. That being said, you surely need the right tools to achieve that goal and unfortunately there's sometime a huge gap between what's available to the public and what's actually cooked in big SFX industries. What's certain is that I'll keep on trying until I succeed no matter what!
Your recent Chimpanzee scene model is quite frankly brilliant! What inspired you to create this scene?
Thank you very much! For the inspiration, I use some sort of an image bank which I go trough until I find something that inspires me. Since I really have a lot of monkey photos and that I was tired of seeing the previous attempt I did back in 2006, I decided to give it another try. I guess it was also a good way to improve my fur/hair skills and stress out the new fur/hair system in Modo 401. I enjoyed it a lot and definitely plan to do others monkeys in the future... I find them quite fascinating!
Can you talk us through how you created this scene and what tools/applications you used?
I already had all the needed references so it was just a matter of selecting the best that would help me getting a better version and learn from the mistakes done on the previous one. I then took that base mesh in Modo and modify its proportions and forms using the sculpting tools with the idea of making it look a bit more like a chimpanzee. I redid the UVs as well and finally exported the mesh to Mudbox.
Since the mesh topology dramatically changed, I decided to redo the entire sculpting even if that wasn't totally necessary. It was a very good exercise and it helped me familiarizing with the new Mudbox 2009.
A big part of the texturing was done in Mudbox because it's really a package dedicated to that kind of jobs and even if Modo has a really good painting system, it can't honestly compete with in terms of speed and efficiency with that kind of tool. These textures were painted from scratch just like most of the textures I had painted for characters so far... I don't use photos because in my opinion, you can't really get a layering effect using them. Besides, I enjoy painting and since these characters are for art's sake and not for money, I don't need to rush things.
The rest of the textures for masking fur attributes plus some minus changes and cleaning were done in Modo . It has the advantage that you just switch to the painter tab and tweak your textures without all the hassles of import/export process and so on. The lighting, shading, fur and rendering were entirely done in Modo too. A maximum of ‘Render Outputs' were used to get as much control as possible in the compositing package.
When we were chatting to Brad Peebler (the CEO of Luxology) recently, he was very pleased by the way Modo is no longer being viewed as simply a modelling program, rather a fully-fledged CG application. One of the things that I found interesting is that for this scene modeling is the only thing you didn't do in Modo! Instead you used it for some texture work, all shading, fur styling and rendering. Why did you choose Modo for these tasks? Does it offer any advantages over other similar applications?
Well, that's almost true but every base mesh is always done in Modo... Mudbox is used for the detailing work. I presume It's the same kind of workflow most artists use and since you can't really create geometry in Mudbox... It would be rather difficult to do otherwise.
There're many reasons why I chose Modo over any other packages but I think the main one is its great render engine. For this work, It was also because I wanted to test the new fur/hair system and see how well it's integrated. That's a big relief because before, I'd have to export the scene with all the settings to another package to render the hair/fur pass, it was kind of a pain and would make matching between rather difficult.
When did you start using Modo and what drew you towards it as a program?
I was a Lightwave user for many years so when I read that their developing team was leaving Newtek to create a new application from the ground up using new technologies, I didn't really hesitate much and jump into the bandwagon... The transition happened smoothly and I definitely don't regret buying their 101 release. At that time it was mainly for modeling but was pretty good already. It has a great UI, a very nice set of tools... It didn't take more than a couple of days to feel myself at home. I don't thing I've ever modeled anything without using it since. Not long after that, I got lucky and joined their beta team, it was really cool to see how fast they would implement new features while being able to use them. It would rapidly get very powerful and each new release would become like Xmas time. I'm really looking forward to seeing what's next!
CGenie: Most people have been watching the Modo 401 previews that Luxology have been posting over the last couple of months, but you are very fortunate in having been able to actually use Modo 401. Having done this, what for you is the biggest improvement that you've noticed?
I have the feeling Luxology is going to be faithful to its reputation and will deliver an amazing update once again. This coming might actually be even bigger than the previous ones but I'll let the users judge about that.
Being under NDA, I must be careful so I'll just give my personal opinion about what's been showed in previews so far: I think the biggest and that's not a scoop would be the animation tools.
I'm personally more interested in character animation and more especially in facial rigging but I've seen brilliant animation rigs done by people from the beta team. I definitely doubt people who're keen of ‘mechanical' rigging will be disappointed. I'd say the second would be the Hair/Fur along with the Instance Replicator system... I still can't figure out how they developed these so fast. I don't really mind for as long as they keep on throwing these great features at us though. Anyway... there're of course dozens of others such as Dispersion, Clearcoat, Volumetric Lighting, Blurry refraction, Photon Mapping to name a few. In fact there're new features or improvements for each tool found in Modo 401, whether it'd be rendering, painting, UV editing, modeling, UI and of course animation. It's been an exciting trip for the past 5 years and I'm sure the best is yet to come!
You've also recent posted another excellent render of a Soldier. Have you followed a similar workflow for this one? (ie Mudbox modeling and Modo for the rest)
Yes, a similar workflow was used except maybe that I find human skin even more challenging and can be really hard to reproduce... Not to imply I succeeded of course, I'm still really far from it. I'd also like to mention that it's even harder when you know that Modo doesn't have any ‘Skin Shader'.
This brings me to say that the main drawback I found is that while most of the other packages include these very useful shaders, Modo 401 doesn't. The current shading model is very good and it can reproduce a big variety of materials including sub surface scattering but the problem is that Car Paint or Skin for instance are really specific due to their layering effect and they require to be implemented with that in mind.
Concerning the workflow, I should also mention that even though it's very similar, I always try to improve the quality and efficiency for each step of the process with each new project.
Jacques, thanks very much for your time and sharing your great work! Any ideas for what your next scene will be?
Thank you very, it's been a pleasure! There are actually quite a lot of things that are in progress (characters, scenes, etc) but since I'm never really satisfied with my work, it'll have to wait a bit more before I show anything.
Check out Jacques' excellent portfolio site at tkio.net!
You can also find some sneak peaks to some of the Modo 401 features on the Luxology site.
