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Niko40 — Little Wolf Poster in 3D

Published: 2009-02-23 00:37:33 +0000 UTC; Views: 2924; Favourites: 19; Downloads: 220
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Description I thank you supadave-3 for bringing this wonderful short movie to this world: [link]
One of the best things I saw on the internet for a Loooong time. So good looking and fun to watch, it took me to make a model of this character.

I can only guess what kind of feelings you have about me taking this character to 3rd dimension... Well, I can't draw 2D so I try my best in 3D. I don't want to step on dave's toes by doing this. I only mean to tell how happy I was to see this film and how much I like the Wolf Mercenary.

It was around 1 month and 1 week when I first saw this film and I started to think about what it would look like in 3D. Just a fun little idea I had in my mind but finally had to try it. I was going to model the head only.

I didn't find accurate enough front and side images to be used with this so I had to imagine the head without any help. Took a while to get even the basic shape.

Couldn't be happy with just the head. Had to do more and now he has fur with over 2 million hairs, body fully rigged for animation purposes and facial bones to bend the face pretty much to every possible pose I saw in the film.

This whole project is made entirely in open source program called Blender 3D or just Blender [link]
Blender internal renderer is used for rendering.

Though I'm no stranger to blender (Been using blender for much more than 4 years, made few dosen or so space ships with it ) this is the first time I ever create something organic with it. Outcounting the 2 human sized suits I made for my ancient game project. So it do not resemble the original wolf perfectly. (This one is well fed )

If Dave want this model to play around with it, it's yours for the asking.

I want to hear your comments about this. I know it's not perfect and has lot of issues but please, say your opinion.
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Comments: 22

bubbles46853 [2012-06-22 12:55:20 +0000 UTC]

Awww...poor little guy...I just wanna hug him...

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Niko40 In reply to bubbles46853 [2012-06-26 17:19:29 +0000 UTC]

Well... People do find my oldest work still? XD Not exactly my best one that is... But I did put a lot of time and energy for him. Seen the short movie about him?

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bubbles46853 In reply to Niko40 [2012-06-26 17:55:45 +0000 UTC]

Yes, it's really good, isn't it?

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Niko40 In reply to bubbles46853 [2012-06-26 18:13:48 +0000 UTC]

That it is. :3

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BiGds [2009-06-01 02:10:38 +0000 UTC]

wow, it look like a screenshot from a game

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Niko40 In reply to BiGds [2009-06-02 19:02:37 +0000 UTC]

Thank you. But take a look at the movie supadave-3 made if you haven't already. [link] He's the real guy to thank in here.

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BiGds In reply to Niko40 [2009-06-02 20:30:30 +0000 UTC]

still, ur works are great too

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Niko40 In reply to BiGds [2009-06-04 19:52:06 +0000 UTC]

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Phoax [2009-03-14 08:12:56 +0000 UTC]

This is wicked, maybe we can have him in a fighting game XD That was just from the top of my head. I myself am interested in 3d modelling and this model has inspired me to start on my old project! How long did it take to render all that fur?

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Niko40 In reply to Phoax [2009-03-14 10:54:33 +0000 UTC]



Sorry. I think my animation skills are not good enough for a fight scenes yet. And I use cartoony characters because that way I don't have to focus on the realism so much, just to the shape I want the character to have.

Blender has one neat little option about the fur and hair. Strand render. Basicly this allows to render HD sized images with one million hairs in less than a minute and with minimal memory requirements.

For the final render I used full quality for soft shadows and ao. I also used full sample aliasing for the final. Means the full scene is rendered 16 times and resulting images are mixed together for anti-aliasing. Render time for the backround was about 30 minutes. Same for the wolf.

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Phoax In reply to Niko40 [2009-03-22 23:38:28 +0000 UTC]

Holy that's amazing. Too bad blender doesn't work on my computer. It crashes when I save. ><

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Niko40 In reply to Phoax [2009-03-23 19:35:58 +0000 UTC]

Thats weird. Blender do crash sometimes but usually newer when you save a project. May be something wrong with the user rights. Try different folder where you save your works and make sure blender has full controll over the folder where blender executable is located.

Blender takes autosaves every 5 minutes (factory settings) and if you can keep blender running with more than a 5 minutes, the broblem is more likely blender specific where I can't really help as I don't know the source code.

Last time I heard about save issues was with version 2.45 and on mandriva. What is your OS and I you don't have the latest blender (2.48a), I recommend you get it. Also try 64 bit version too or 32 bit version if you already use 64 bits. 64 is faster though.

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Phoax In reply to Niko40 [2009-03-24 00:45:23 +0000 UTC]

It's on XP. I will check once again if it's the user rights problem but I remember checking that when I first came across the problem. Anyway it's alright. Thanks for the concern and help ^^

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rubberbend [2009-03-13 09:49:49 +0000 UTC]

this is awesome
am too a fellow fan of Wolf
the background is awesome, and it looks like its really hot
very nice

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Niko40 In reply to rubberbend [2009-03-14 09:14:08 +0000 UTC]

Thank you.

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GemmaElaineArt [2009-02-25 09:56:04 +0000 UTC]

That is a very good 3D representation of Wolf!
It's awesome, you should be very proud. And If I were Dave I'd be very flattered.

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Niko40 In reply to GemmaElaineArt [2009-02-25 14:04:42 +0000 UTC]

It's good to see you like it. Helps to keep me going.

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SupaCrikeyDave [2009-02-25 09:51:29 +0000 UTC]

That's...friggin'....awesome!

He looks good....really good. His body looks great, how it nicely reflects the landscape and how his fur can be seen around the edges softly. I particularity like the background, how it feels blisteringly hot.

I'm very pleased you liked my film and thank you very much for this awesome work. I am deeply flattered.

Wolf looks pretty sweet in 3D

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Niko40 In reply to SupaCrikeyDave [2009-02-25 13:59:19 +0000 UTC]

I'm so glad you like it. And releafed.

To tell the truth, the head don't actually look that great from directly the front.

I can do some more pictures from this or some small, few second animation. I'm no animator though, so will take some time to get animation, but I try.

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SupaCrikeyDave In reply to Niko40 [2009-02-26 09:51:47 +0000 UTC]

Regardless, flattered I be

Certainly can do up more shots, or even animations, of 3D Wolf.

You mentioned this was made in Blender 3D...I wonder if that's compatible with AutoDesk Maya. If not, I'd still be honoured to have a copy of the Blender file.

I may have to get the program to try some animating of my own

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Niko40 In reply to SupaCrikeyDave [2009-02-26 15:26:40 +0000 UTC]

Might be easier to test it with blender. Blender's gui is different from other applications though. It's not hard to learn anymore is what I'v heard, but it's not the "3D application standard". (It still looks like spaceship's master control panel )
You will need to know some keys for this. I recommend this page: [link]
A bit outdated as every other tutorial for blender is, but the basic things are the same.

I'm going to do some small debug before I send it to you.

I found Autodesk .dxf and Autodesk .fbx formats are supported. So mesh I can export, other stuff I'm not so sure.

I'm not familiar with the Autodesk Maya so I'm listing some things in here.

There is control bones to control multiple other bones (Move control bone in X and it moves the first in Z with 5 times the speed, rotates the second in Y and scales the third in X and Y in local space) and some bones have ik solvers. IK solver in blender works somehow different from other programs. Or so I'v heard. Not sure about this.

There is also deform lattices on the face and python code on the tail I think. Not sure since I borrowed the tail curve from frankie. (Blender foundation's second open movie [link] ) The fur is made of particles and set to be editable. After this you can edit the hair however you wish. Even one master hair at a time if necesary. Strand primitive is used for the fur and this is pretty much blender specific for my knowing, but only effects rendering.
... ...

OK should be enough for this time.

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SupaCrikeyDave In reply to Niko40 [2009-02-27 10:03:10 +0000 UTC]

Awesome I shall wait patiently and have a read up on Blender.

Good stuff, man

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