This was my entry in CGtalk’s hardcore modeling challenge- Stan Winston Tribute.

Bishop torn in half

Most classic scifi and horror movies were made famous by Stan Winston’s special effects. In memorandum CG Society’s HMC decided to pay him tribute, the subject of HMC #16 was any character from one of his movies. I chose to model the character “Bishop” (played by Lance Henriksen) from the movie “Aliens” in the scene where he is pulled in half by the alien queen.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, here’s a clip of the scene:

Bishop was my favorite character in the movie, and I wanted a challenge. I gathered some references on the web, and realized it wasn’t very easy to get good ones for the scene I wanted. I rented the movie and took some screen captures, but the impalement scene was so short I didn’t have much to go on.

Bishop Saving Newt From the Airlock

The lighting is too dark

The darkness of the scene obscured the details of Bishop’s navy blue clothes. So I took screenshots from other parts of the movie.

It’s also difficult to get orthographic references for modeling the face. The movie camera angles are rarely in the right direction, and the actors are seldom caught in an emotionally neutral facial pose. Even if you pick pictures that you feel are very close to orthographic, you begin to notice facial landmarks just don’t match up where they’re supposed to when you’re starting to block in polygons for the face.

Thee Images of Bishop's Face

Bishop, early stage

Nevertheless, I did my best and Bishop’s face is starting to take form. While this is a very early stage screenshot of my progress, you can see how it already resembles the character.

I decided to model the body in pieces:

1. The head
2. The arms (each a separate polygon piece)
3. The jumpsuit
4. The body cavity
5. The andoid innards

Wireframes of Bishop's Sections

One of my first mistakes is not putting in enough polygons for the ear, and it came out horribly distorted with I first started experimenting with my displacement maps. I was able to improve the ears, but sometimes the smooth preview in Maya leads to a false sense of comfort. I need to keep in mind that the preview will look nothing like the final render, and fine details aren’t easy to get in later displacement maps unless you’ve planned your basemesh well.

Bishop's face in Zbrush

Finally, my head model is exported into Zbrush for fine tuning. Eventually I move on to the other sections of his body.

I run into a dilemma with the torn fringes of Bishop’s jumpsuit where the cloth is torn away to reveal the inside of his chest cavity and the gooey android innards. I always try to keep my mesh light, but there is a lot of detail that needs to be included in order to give the look of torn cloth. Jagged edges, tears, and uneven threads require a lot of polygons right at the edge of the jumpsuit. Instead of making my mesh heavy, I decide to go with a transparency map.

Most of the innards were tube like, and easy to simulate using nurbs tubes and procedural textures, positioning them wasn’t quite as simple but I’m glad this was the least painful part of creating the model.

I never consider a model finished, there’s always things to improve or even rebuild, but the HMC was coming to a end and I was out of time. I am satisfied enough with the results to submit my entry. It was a lot of fun to model, and picking a challenging subject forces you to learn new things.

My final entry for HMC 16- click for larger render