Amazing work! 
I already attended even the passages of the videos of “Blur.” These lively monsters are fantastic.
Amazing!
Anderson Soares
gendragon
Realy Awsome
I’m fan of warhammer and seeing these characters come to life is just amazing
thanks for sharing
Truly, Truly Stunning!!!
Whoever says Games aren’t an artform is an a**burp!
Keep on Z-ing!
fishadder
Thank you so much for all the great info, I really appreciate that.
@:[Blur]Jed:
Hmm, pretty interesting that you use XSI for the Rigging and Skinning part - may I ask you why ? Is it so much better doing that part with XSI compared to 3dsmax ?
@animation:
I am not sure if I am right, but it looks like you have used a lot of mocap or biviosion files for the animation. It looks really like in real life. So if you use mocap files, do you record these files in house or do you work together with another company that provides you that service ? Hmm, and what about the facial expressions ?
@Directing:
Indeed, additional to all that great modelling and lighting work, you do need to tell a story and bring the stage to become alive. I never could get any information about that wonderful part - what means, who was the director or who was responsible for making these excelent camera shots ?
Who ever it was, he is a master in his artwork, and it would be also an honor for us if he would like to introduce himself and maybe he would like to tell us a little bit about his camera and directing work, which is just really amazing.
There are so many pieces, and each of them is just so interesting and takes a lot of talent and efforts in order to make such a cinematic eyecandy.
Thank you all for your hard work and thank you all for letting us know a little bit more about your fantastic artwork.
hey i would like ask a few questions also,(not like you havent asnwered enough). its basically about the workflow you guys use to model characters. when you guys finish modeling a character, do you unwrap it as soon as your done,and then you bring it to zbrush? if not how can you captured all the detail from an already sculpted model with no uvs, into one that has uvs.and at what point do you generate displacement maps. also if you texture a hi-res model in zbrush with no uvs how can you export the texture to an unwraped model? Sorry, 
i hope its not too much to ask… but if it is i completly understand:) . thank you
hey dagoned,
every character modeller here at blur has slightly differing approaches to tackling our characters. however there are a few common points that we all go through.
here at blur, remember that all our characters are going to be animated so things like good edge flow or topology is very very important. part of our job is to make sure all our characters make the riggers and animators happy.
generally we first quickly build a polygon model that has a minimal of surface detail to define the proportions of the character. this is generally the first point of approval with the cg supervisor. i personally prefer to use 3dsmax with polyboost but some of the guys here perfer to use xsi to do their poly modelling.
after we’ve gotten approval for proportions we start detailing the surface with poly modelling. it is generally here that i start figuring out what areas will be zbrushed. in my process i generally try to hit the silhouettes with my poly modelling, then do the uv’s then do my zbrushing and generate either normal maps or displacement maps depending on whether we’re gonna use displacement or not. at this point its also very important to pay attention to topology to make sure everything that’s gonna be deformed (joints) have enough detail and good edge flow. after this is done there is another pass of approval for the topology.
finally we make our textures and shaders. i think all of us use photoshop to make our textures, i think quite a few of us also use bodypaint 3d to fix our seams and we generally use mental ray to render so we build our shaders for mental ray.
that’s a general overview of how we approach our characters. its a bit different for every character modeller here. the thing is that here at blur we still very much emphasize a good poly model. our characters aren’t made for a nice single still render, they have to move around a lot. so its very important to have a good poly model that will hold up well when its deformed.
there are some variants of course depending on the character and the project and whether we are gonna use displacement rendering. in one recent project we did, what i did first was to take a very simple base man character and sculpt it to the general proportions and get proportional approval. then i used polyboost’s retopology tools to build a new cage with good topology on top of my sculpt, paying attention especially to the joints like shoulders, knees and face etc. then i did uv’s on the model and took that new poly model and resculpted the character with much more detail. then i generated a displacement map and finally textured it with photoshop and bodypaint and built shaders for it.
zbrush is an excellent tool in our toolbox but it certainly isn’t the only one. off the top of my head in our character pipe here we use 3dsmax, xsi, deep uv, zbrush, mudbox, bodypaint, photoshop, and some others i’m sure i’m not thinking of right now.
hope that helps and thanks to everyone for their kind words regarding our work on warhammer.
-j
wow kuman. i’m completly honest with you when i tell you that i have lots of repect towards you, just for taking the time and actually writing this message, it really says a lot about u as person. Well i just wanted to say THANK YOU. you and blur rock. lol. and i hope in the future you can check out some of my characters and tear them apart lol. but really, thank you for answering me back. i’m copying and pasting this into notepad, so i can remember when i’m creating my characters- thanks for your time i dont mean to bother anyone. have a nice day
Thank you Kuman for your message Kuman.
And it makes it more and more fantastic. Especially for Animation I can imagine how much work needs to be done, until you can use a sculpted model for the final animation.
And yes, I guess the topology or edge flow is extrem important in order to make the animations. The only thing I don’t understand: Is’nt the topology already created from ZBrush good enough for animation ?
Well, I was thinking about ZBrush and ZSpheres. I have never seen such a cool tool in any other software - the ZSpheres automaticly generates a fantastic Topology… as instance, you create a head with the eyes, mouth, etc…
once started with ZSpheres it automaticly generates edge loops for the eyes or mouth, or ears, etc… and the topology is really very, very nice…
So I don’t understand why you have to generate a new topology ?
- is this, because you usually start modelling in max, basic shapes, etc ?
UVWs:
Hmm, I read a lot about different workflows and how important the UVW’s are of course - so you can texture all your stuff in photoshop, or what else.
But I also coould see that Polypaint in ZBrush gives you such a powerfull tool to texture your mesh, well… so why doing the UVW’s - I know this is an extra effort and can take a while …
Wouldn’t it be much easier and faster using straight ZBrush, Polypainting, exporting the texture map… done ?
I know you have your reasons, and I guess it’s just because I don’t understand your full workflow - it would be great if you would like to explain a littel bit - that’s freakin awesome !!!
hmm, maybe a bit off topic:
the sound effects, do you produce all the cool sound efects inhouse ?
or do you have a special company you work together ?
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR GREAT INFO, THAT’S JUST AMAZING !
capu
hi capu,
i think the best answer to both your questions is control.
i certainly can’t speak for everyone’s workflow but i find that i prefer fine control over the poly model and the texture.
first let me preface by saying that i personally dont use zspheres or polypainting that much. however from what i have used and tested of zspheres, it does certainly generate a good topology but at its lower subdivisions it is still very evenly distributed polys and kind of balloony. off the top of my head i can think of 3 good reasons to finely tune your poly flow in a modelling app. one you can control the density better. for example a joint might have more edges and detail, where as the areas above and beneath the joint can have less density. while we dont have poly count limits like in games, nonetheless at blur we still need to keep our polygon counts reasonable. the second good reason is that you may not always be using displacement on a character, jed actually mentioned earlier in this thread why we may not always use displacement. as you’ve probably seen when you reduce the sub div levels details tend to fade away into bigger and bigger polys. sometimes that even-distributed smoother mesh even with a normal map you make just wont hold up. something which has always given me problems lately is actually how when you use a normal map with mental ray’s skin shader, the sss tends to kill all the details of your normal map. finally i guess it’s also my preference. i was doing organic modeling with polygons long before there was a zbrush and i like the control you have with on a vertex, edge and polygon level.
as with texturing, once again i haven’t done a ton of polypainting but i generally perfer to have good uv’s and paint my textures in photoshop. i think photoshop gives you much better control on the pixel level as well as alot of tools with different layers blending modes etc. plus good uv’s make editing later on easier. a lot of these things can probably be done with zbrush but i find i prefer the control these programs have.
perhaps i dont know how to use all the tools in zbrush properly, but say for example i wanted to sample in an area of a photo for the wrinkles underneath the eyes and i wanted to reshape what i sample and have it sample in at 25 percent opacity over an underpainting. with good uv’s and photoshop i can cut out that area in a photo, use the free transform tool and the liquify filter for very fine control reshaping it, put that on an overlay layer and set it to a light opacity and mask out the borders and perhaps other areas until it blends nicely. i’m not sure how to do that in zbrush or if its doable.
i’m sure there’s ways to do these things in many programs and as i said, everyone’s workflow is different. this is mainly what works for me.
take care
-j
oh yah, as for the music and sound fx. i’m pretty sure we dont do those at blur. that or they’ve done a great job hiding the sound studio/room from everyone at the studio ;). i think a lot of times a third party does it, either we get someone or the client has someone they hire to do it.
Hello Kuman,
thank you so much for your post, this is really great.
Well, it all makes sense… especially the example why you rather do all the UVW mapping…
thx a lot I really appreciate that much,
capu
Wow! Great informative posts kuman! Thanks for sharing your time to post these answers and insights here! Respect!
In the first place, congratulations for your great job, when i grow up i´d like to be like yours. All models posted are very good but, please, my little green heart want to see meshes of orcs (orcs are my army of warhmmer, i know, i´m not partial).
Thanks for share your art.
You mentioned that you rigged and animated in XSI. Could you tell me how you get the animation data back into 3DSMax for you to render?
Cheers
LittleClaude
how did you get around flicker issues when rendering animation with mental ray???
Hi man!! your characters works are very cool… can you share some of the textures you used… gr8 job
I dream to create that quality art… one day 
Thanks for share !
Thank you all for sharing this pictures and informations!