Hamster

Hi there!

It´s quite some time ago since I´ve modeled something organic so I decided to do so. My wife, who owns two hamster, gave somehow the direction to this project ;-)
My main attention was in mastering the Hair&Fur-System in 3ds max, which still can be quite a pain in the *** ;-) But the only real alternative to the build in Hair-System is "HairFarm" from Cyberradiance which at least cost 700$. Far to much for Non-Professionals :-((


^This is the low poly-hamster mesh (1998 Polys)^. Not perfect because there are a few triangles and the edge flow could still be a little smoother for animation, but hey....I´m still learning with every new model and every day ;-)


^Smoothed Version with final Hairstyle^. The final rendered version will contain almost twice as much hairs for a denser an more fluffy look. The problem with the H&F-Modifier is that it crashes 3ds max if the haircount is to high. So I used a second hamster-mesh, collapsed it into 8 smaller meshes which are driven by a skin wrap-modifier and added a seperate H&F-Modifier to each of them. This way the final haircount can be much higher than with a single H&F-Modifier.
But be warned: Skin Wrap in combination with H&F and meshsmooth is tricky to handle with animation!!!

Hamster Bone_System from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.

^Bone-System^
Test and preview of the bone-system using spline-helper. The skin-stretching looks quite nice so far, especially around the neck and chin-area. But the overall envelope-blending is not soft enough yet and may need a little more tweeking. But I´m not sure if I´ll ever animate this hamster, so I´ll leave it like it is for now.


^Draft body and facial animation-test^
I´ve made a little test-animation to make sure that the bone-system, the hair-objects attached with skin wrap and the facial animation-system (morpher) works well together.

Hamster Hair_Test from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.

^Hairflow-test^
Because it takes so much time to render dense hair I just did a quick test with the head if the hair would move and stretch correct with the skin

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This hamster really took me some time because of the buggy hairsystem in max. The styling tools are hard to control and the build in undo-function is quite useless because it just don´t work most of the times. But like always, I´ve learned a lot and it was a lot of fun building this little fellow :-)

Palm House

While my Patio de la Acequia-Scene (see below) is on ice I decided to do a little less complicated scene. This one is´nt my best work, but still I learned a lot and that´s the most important thing - I guess ;-)


^Final shot! (rendered with mental ray)^
I´m not quite happy with the lighting, and the sunloungers are far to big compared to the people. Furthermore the grass is far to green and even and the furniture in the upper floor looks kinda flat due to a bad lighting, I guess.


^Main-model with skylight^


^Night-Shot^


^Kitchen close-up^


^Kitchen close-up AO-Pass^


^Terrace close-up^


^Terrace close-up AO-pass^


^Living room^


^Living room AO-pass^

Patio de la Acequia

Hi again!

Right now I´m building a 3D-version of the Patio de la Acquia (photo reference)

As you can see, there´s still a lot to do. I have to model all the plants, set up a particle system in combination with a blob-object to get some nice water-sprinkler-effects and so on....

The tiles on the roofs gave me a hard time, because I wanted them to be real 3D-Objects instead of using a displacement map. The main problem was that they all would use the same map if I would have used instances. And if every tile would be a single mesh the scene would become far to heavy. So I used a "Material by Element"-Modifier which works great in combination with a multi/sub-material. This way I can use mesh-instances and multiple maps at the same time.


For all other objects, like this archway, I use displacement- and normal-maps for the details. The gear-looking bulges are done by a procedural displacement-map and the ornaments by a normal-map.


Texturing a complex model with a lot of details like this takes more time than I ever thought. Diffuse-, Bump-, Normal- and Spec-Maps, AO-Pass, Camera-DoF, Lighting...and not to forget the final compositing of all render-passes in PS to achieve a most realistic look. That´s a lot of work for one final shot *g* But like all things in life, you just have to get used to it ;-))

EDIT: This scene is on ice for now :( With all the plants added, the scene is far to big for my PC and I need more RAM to render it.

Older Projects

Hi there!

Finally I have some free time to publish my first blog-entry to show at least a few pictures of my previous works. All models are done in 3ds max and rendered with mental ray. But most of them are not finalized yet and some of them hardly ever will (because they were just made to test lighting, edge flow, modifiers and/or texturing).

But let´s just get things started....
3D-Version of a Naeschke-Chronometer

This was one of my very first projects. It contains a lot of chamfered standard primitives and lathe-objects. The real challenge were to achieve a most realistic look. And even if it still looks a little artificial, I learned a lot about mr-materials and studio-lighting

Male Head

My first attempt to model a human head with a natural edge flow. Nothing special here

Self portrait

Second attempt of modeling a human head but this time my digital alter ego. And I have to say, it´s really close to the original. What is very impressive for me because this model teached me that it´s much harder to recreate yourself than someone else. Not finished yet, but as soon as I have enough time I will!

3D-model of the Willy-Brandt-House in Luebeck/Germany



My first attempt in architectural modeling (the persons were added later in PS). This scene took me a lot of time because it contains so much details like this fully integrated Restaurant in the basement (on the left side)...

and three floors with completely furnished offices

The ceiling in this room gave me a headache because I cut in the holes for the lights with the proboolean-function in max, which I´ll never use again. The remodeling took me much more time than doing it by hand in first place.


Whow...time goes by far to fast. See you guys next time with hopefully some more images :-))