Self portrait

Based on a photo Jun took of me at the pub on Friday
I'm uglier than this in real life

Endless tweaking of the shader and banging my head against the wall dealing with hair (again).
Thought I better get a move on before I get sick of this so I started on the helmet

Shader progress

Some work on the skin shader
Ear is a bit shiny and the bump map needs a fair bit of refinement, he's a bit bumpy and waxy

Sgt. Colon

Added to speed sculpt, blocking out a body and costume elements

My take on Josh Kidby's illustration of Terry Pratchett's Discworld character Sgt. Colon from the watch.

Needs a fair few more costume elements blocked in; cape, badge, belts, leg armor etc.

Speed Sculpt

About an hour starting from a sphere using dynamesh

Jackrum WIP2

Tweaking of the shader and attempting to balance details

This has a little bit of sharpen added in photoshop as I was trying to get that high contrast B&W
look like the photography of Mark Story

I'm having a few issues balancing the shader glossiness/spec and the light size and intensity, I seem to be chasing them round in circles a bit.
Need to make eyebrows and eyelashes and maybe tiny facial hairs

Jackrum WIP1

Started a sculpt a few days ago of sergeant Jackrum from Terry Practhett's Discworld novel "Monstrous Regiment"
The expression is supposed to be a bit more evil and less bewildered than it is now
Costume elements are just at blocking stage this far

Max, zbrush, mari, vray

Different lighting and some more work on the shader

Dragon

Jono Friesler wanted the head/neck of a dragon for a project he's working on.
I thought it would be a good chance to do the whole thing, everything is wip at the moment, lots of zbrush needed.
I put in a CAT rig to pose it for testing.

Speedsculpt with dynamesh

Just got Zbrush 4R2 and was mucking around with dynamesh from a sphere, good fun and should be a useful tool

more work

More work on everything
Most stuff is at some stage of WIP
Still adding bits to the costume as I go

Work on the face

I wanted to get some texturing going and try some blending of displacements coming out of Zbrush with painted ones and getting a bit of a shader together. Lots of tweaking needed.
Getting some good (but harsh!) feedback from Julie about the harmony of the facial details so I have a fair way to go to balance them out properly. Just found a rogue colour correct that was boosting the amount of red in the diffuse, which probably isn't helping. Colour blindness is starting to be a pain in the arse.

WIP #2

Had a bit of time to spend on this guy over the weekend
Some bad stuff going on in the ribcage area but coming along
Still struggling with a costume

Ogre type thing WIP

Made this in a few hours from my human base mesh. I would like to take it further but I'll see what happens. The head design was heavily influenced by Gio Nakpil's awesome ogre bust. I might have to try and change mine a bit so it's not so similar. It is fun to try and construct a body after the fact though.

Bob Brown Sculpt

Work has been busy so I haven't had much time for sculpting

This is a 5-6 hour attempt at Bob Brown of the Australian Greens political party
I just trawled through my reference folder and found some images of him

WIP #whatever

some more work on this model

I lost a bunch of work because I stupidly subdivided to 20mil polys and then had saving errors. Stupid, stupid. The model is sitting at 5 million where it will stay for now, some tests with HD sculpting have been promising so hopefully I can use that to add detail. I'm still kind of searching for a surface and musculature that I like but it's moving along anyway. The pose will have to be adjusted to fit the weapon when I get around to blocking something out for it but it's close enough for now.

Pose WIP

Putting this guy in a pose. It's really hard to get something balanced and with good shapes that works with the anatomy and concept I have in my head. It's pretty messy right now as the muscles have been pushed around a lot and need to be reformed a bit. Minigun is a downloaded model with extra stuff stuck on it for the moment. I imagine this thing will keep changing as I go along.

Mutant Lemur #2

Retopo'd this guy and made changes to forms and proportions, started trying out stuff on the head area. Pose is crappy and just for fun. Added teeth and gums. I'm trying to make sure the insanity comes through.Topology

Mutant Lemur

I was watching a Richard Attenborough documentary about Madagascar that had lemurs in it. Also I wanted a bit of a release from the more realistic restrained project that I'm working on. It's a mutated Lemur monster thing. It's fun doing a more comic book style. I might retop it and move it up a few subdivisions and go full on detail, this is pretty WIP at the moment, trying to figure out proportions and muscle groups.

RETOP

Lots and lots of retop.....
Trying to get all the major folds in geometry before adding smaller stuff in zbrush.
It can be kinda gruelling though. Thankg god most of it is done

Reworking the face

I recently saw some pretty awesome human renders and reevaluated where my head model/shader/lighting was at and it was pretty rubbish. I spent some nights this week redoing the shader, refining the sculpt, making new eyes and changing pretty much all the maps. It still needs a fair bit of work, I have to test ways to get some softness into the eyes and there is too much bump and spec on the neck, but at least it's better than it was.
I also decided to only do minimal post stuff on my wips (just a zblur for DOF and a slight defocus to remove cg sharpness) as it hides problems that should be fixed.

Progress

Retopped the hoodie and the backpack and started detailing the straps.
I've changed the jeans to more of a skinny jean and adjusted the proportions as his legs were too short. Added some headphones.

Hoodie Retop

Mostly retopped hoodie done with Wrapit in MAX. Took ages but I wanted to investigate techniques for retopping cloth accurately from a sculpt.
It's 100K polys

Blocking out the rest

I've been blocking out the elements for the rest of the body for this guy. All elements are at varying stages of WIP, the plan is to retop it all using wrapit. I started with a basic naked human mesh and built clothes and stuff around it in max and sculpted in ZB. It's a good challenege to model cloth and something I don't do enough of. The pose is a temp thing cos I got sick of looking at it in a neutral pose. I haven't yet put the top section on the beanie and the jeans are pretty rough. I also thinking of adding headphones as this guy was more or less inspired by people that I see while walking around Melbourne

Modeling a beanie

My half arsed explanation of how I modeled the beanie.

-Model a stitch
-Unwrapping at this point can be useful for mappin g bump or disp to each stitch
-Mirror it
-Array the stitches (you can adjust the individual stitch easier when it is arrayed properly
-Array the stitches into a cylinder
-Use FFDs and zbrush to wrap it onto the head
-Use spacing tool and a spline to create the rim
-A circular patch of stitches can create the top cap of the beanie, much like real beanies are made

Head WIP #4

Some more work on this dude. Lighting has changed a bit and I've added the beanie. All the knit is modeled and and shaped onto the head.

Head WIP3

Relit the scene, worked on the shader, added some hair elements. There is not enough light getting into the eye sockets so they look a bit dark and weird. Things like the eybrows and eyelashes also need a fair bit of work. I need to add a bit of texture variation into the ears like maybe some veins or something, they look pretty flat. I planned to give him a beanie but now I'm starting to thing that will be a pain in the arse. I thing I will give him some kind of hat though

I've relit the scene to something more neutral, updated most of the maps, updated the detailing on the sculpt and played with the shaders a bit. I've had to soften the 3d render a bit as I think I have an antialising filter in Vray that is too sharp. Also both my monitors have vastly different sharpnesses which is a pain. I need to get more out of the spec maps and localise stuff a bit more but I think it's moved along since the last render. Funny how how breakup in the skin texture ages him by like 10 years
ZB Sculpt

As Yet Unnamed Project WIP1

A new personal project I'm working on.
I originally wanted to do a skateboarder type guy so that is where this started.
I'm aiming to do the entire body but I just wanted to do a head so I started here.
Everything's kind of coming together at once which is generally how I prefer to work. So nothing is final at the moment. The general proportions and anatomy, sculpt detail, various texture maps and hair stuff, lighting etc all need to be refined.
I like making ordinary looking people though, something about average looking faces is much more interesting than super stylised or fantasy creations to me sometimes.
The eye and forehead areas are sticking out to me the most at the moment. He looks like he's had botox or something. Desperately needs eyelashes also.

Nightmare Chicken Strip

This concept is from a thread on the SomethingAwful forums.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3397684

The artwork was supplied by forum user "The Scarlet Hot Dog" and I thought it was cool and would be fun to recreate in 3D.
He's like a breaded chicken strip or something, in nightmare form.

It was challenging to get a deep fried look in the shader, and it isn't very succesful but I didn't have long to spend on it.

Max, Zbrush, Vray, Nuke, Photoshop. More or less in that order.

I have a simple rig so I might try and do some stupid animations.

CONCEPT By artist known only as John, the roommate of forums poster "The Scarlet Hot Dog"

3D render by me

New Sculpt

This is a new sculpt I've worked on for probably 6 or 7 hours
I thought that after sculpting a caucasian looking man it would be good to sculpt an african looking woman. Although at the moment she kinda has some manish features going on.
Could possibly be the extreme focal length distorting the features a bit

I did a bit of a paintover in photoshop for fun, hence the weird eyes.

Man, nude, with bucket

I've finished working on this guy. There's bits that could be fixed but there always is. I added the loincloth because some forums have rules about nudity. I'll render a final naked version aswell.

Human WIP#4

Revisited this model to get a bit of a pose happening and a bit of hair and stuff. Trying out hairfarm at the moment, haven't quite got the results I'm after yet. I might give him some pants to cover his shame

Another WIP

Did some lighting and shader work on this today as well as some comp in Nuke
I chucked in eyes that I had from my other project and havent done textures for the teeth and gums yet

Messing with the shader

I did some experimenting with the normal map and found that it was coming into max inverted causing the strangeness in the previous render. It's not that simple going from zbrush to max sometimes. This render has the SSS effect turned up too high mainly just to see what it would do. It has muddied out a lot of the detail as has the DOF effect that I put on for fun. Getting closer though

Speed sculpt render

Exported some displacement and normal maps to do some rendering in MAX, there are seam problems with the normal map

Speed Sculpt

Spent a few hours on this today using the same base mesh as my human project. Making it up as I go. I'd like to do some more deatiling.

Human WIP#3

Some more work on this model. First pass at mr prim hair in vray, it's extremely slow and requires lots of samples to get a decent render, the result here is still pretty muddy at 1/16. I would love to use hairfarm but it costs too much.
I need to add pubic hair and overall body hair, some of this will probably be done using vray fur, if it works on displaced geometry There are areas in the textures and the sculpt that need addressing also.

Human WIP #2

Just some more sculpting on this dude and a quick hair test.
Vray can now render Max's hair and fur modifier with the mr prim rendering method. This is pretty cool as it allows me to light my hair with vray lights and GI if I want.

Homo Sapiens

I started this anatomy test a fair while ago because I hit a major creative dead end with my dragon. I havent been able to work on it much becasue of work on a general lack of energy but with the constant rain this weekend I had a chace to dust him off and try and make some progress. This render is from Vray using the SSS2 shader and 4 X 2K displacement maps (I'm testing out multiple UV region workflows in ZBrush). ZApplink works with multi UV so I should be able to get an obscene amount of detail in some maps. The poly limit in ZB will be a problem for utilising 4 X 4K disp maps though. More sculpting needed and more details

Dragon Retop #2

Finished the first pass of retop on this model
I'm continuing to change the proprtions and stuff in small ways as I go through the retop process and I'm still looking for ways to improve the model. Still coming to grips with what should be modeled in with edgeloops and what can be displaced.
This is a bit of a test pose to see how the model deforms and cos I got sick of looking at it in it's stupid base pose.

Dragon Retop

Using Matt Clark's Wapit plugin to retop this drgaon character. Still a fair bit to go yet.
There's been a bit of a learning curve, but once I got the hang of it, it's a good quick way to retop a character. Defintely better than the graphite workflow that comes with Max. So far the topology is all quads but I still have some detailing and creases to add, and some gbits yet to be joined up. This stage is getting boring and I'm looking forward to going back ZBrush to detail

Learning to sculpt

I haven't tried to sculpt anything with clay since primary school so I thought it was time to try again. Julie bought me some clay last christmas so this was a good chance to use it. Having pretty much learned to sculpt in a digital environment, working with physical media did my head in a bit (stupid gravity) but it was fun.

Dragon WIP#2

Some more work on this model. Changing up the physiology a bit to make it a bit more logical and working a bit more on his head.
Thanks to Jono Freisler, professor of dragon anatomy, for help on muscle groups