Casals Headshot

A cloesup, artsy render of this guy

Brunhilde Shield WIP

Looking at the pose it seemed that the shield was going to take up a fair bit of screen space, just by necessity, so I put some effort into coming up with an interesting design for it. The shape is based on a Germanic kind of shield and the design itself is based around the Norse goddess Freyja who is in charge of the Valkyries. I tried to do some Norse knotwork around the place but it's more celtic than Norse really. The boar at the top of the design is the giant boar she apparently rides. The shape down the bottom is the hammer of Thor. She also has a chariot drawn by cats but I couldn't find anywhere to incorporate that, cool though it would have been. I'm pretty sure the shader will change a fair bit as the whole thing comes along

Brunhilde WIP

I wanted to do another musically themed character and learn some female anatomy so I decided to have a go at an opera singer. This is based on the character of Brunhilde from Wagner's Ring of Nibelungen opera. I've started on the costume, she will be holding a sword and shield and be wearing some sort of breastplate or mail that I haven't decided on yet. Probably a winged helmet also.

MAX/Vray render with old hair that was too high on the head

I don't get no respect! I tell ya....

 

No respect at all...

Speed Sculpt

Something I did this afternoon, a slightly stylised kind of guy

Cellist WIP

Got some time off at the moment so I'm sinking some of it into this model.
There's quite a few things to fix on this but at least it might actually get finished

A ring for Bel

My wife Julie was comissioned to create a ring for a friend of ours. The brief was quite loose (but based around Victorian filigree style) which gave her freedom to try out some interesting designs. Early on we decided to try them out in 3D, initially just as a way of visualising Julie's ideas but then we decided to attempt to have the object 3D printed and then cast in silver. 

The inital design of the band as it would be "unrolled".   

 

 The 3D model was created in MAX, the measurements are there as a guide to the firm doing the printing, as you can see the object itself was very small with some details getting down to the .1mm range. As someone who has only ever modeled for screen and print purposes, it is a challenge to get used to modeling for real world applications.

Pre vis-ing the ring on a hand mesh

 

 After some trial and error (mostly error on my part) we got the tolerances and dimensions figured out in 3D and off to the printers. What we got back was this. The cage like structure is from the multiple sprues necessary for the metal to flow into all the tight spaces of the piece (or so I'm told).

 

 Julie then chopped off all the sprues and cleaned up and polished the piece, polished all the convex surfaces blackened the crevices to highlight the shapes.

The piece was then taken to the setter to have the two diamonds set. Below is the result

 

This process was a major learning experience for both of us. Completing a challenging piece such as this will definitely be valuable experience for the next project we try. 

Check out Julie's work here

Shader Test

A test of the skin shader for this model with some quick hair elements

Rendered in vray

Head retop and progress

Retopped this head and made some progress with the sculpt

Head Sculpt

I haven't done any 3D at home for moths so I've decided to get back into it and try some stuff
I spent a few hours on this today, it's based on the famous Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, I have a plan to do a full character, we'll see how that goes...

Half day model

I started on this to see how far my new base mesh could be pushed around and ended up with this wrinkly dude. Around 5 hours spent on it

Ziltoid the Omniscient: A triptych

Ziltoid the Omniscient


We saw Devin Townsend last week and Pete suggested that I do sculpt of the puppet Ziltoid.
I've spent about 5 hours on this.
Zbrush, zpsheres, dynamesh, retop with wrapit, simple rig with max bones, displacement created with Zbrush, rendered with vray and comped in nuke.
If I can be stuffed I will do the hands and some morph shapes for his face.

This render is some quick poses using the bone rig

A Distorted King of Norway

This is a caricature of the king of Norway based on an image manipulation using photoshop's content aware scale by forums user Grei Skuring on the Somethingawful.com forums. I just liked the proportions and wanted to make it in 3d. Spent about 2-3 hours.

Good excuse to mess around a bit with Zbrush's fibremesh and BPR functions also

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