Snake Scales

                                                         Tiger Snake Scale Process

A quick rundown of how I set up the scales on this tiger snake model

Base geometry of the snake

Body scales and Belly scales

In Blender I created an array of curves to distribute the  body scales with the 50% offset for each row  

I used geometry nodes to distribute the scales on the points with some random variation and get a flat scales sheet, and a separate one for the belly scales

I used a Blender plugin called mesh materializer to wrap the flat sheet of scales on the the UV space of the snake mode. I used a lattice deformer on the scale sheet to help fit it better and get some scale tapering. I created some different scale sheets to get more control closer to the tail. I then fixed it up a bit in zbrush.
 

https://superhivemarket.com/products/mesh-materializer

The head scales were made by extracting one at a time in zbrush and using zrememsher

 

I used surface deform on the scales to bind them to the rigged snake model

That's pretty much it :)

40 min Angela Merkel sculpt

Quick one, couldn't get the pursed lips to feel quite right, among other things

Zbrush speed sculpt portrait

Done in work breaks, no reference used

Trump speed sculpt

20~ min zbrush sculpt from a sphere

Interesting times...

 

Seated Man #3

Spent too long on this so it's time to move on. Learnt a few things 

Seated Man #2

Putting in a few hours here and there on this man. Did some lighting tests in Max. Still symmetrical

Seated old man

A anatomy study kind of thing, so far it's done from no specific reference. 

Human WIP

A project I've been working on between jobs, trying to model normal looking people, still lots to do

Alien concept

Spent a few hours on this then tried a bit of hard surface costume stuff, I need to learn how to do hard surface in zbrush.

Chicken

I've wanted to do a mounted character for a while so I thought the goblin could ride a rooster. I also wanted to take a break from sculpting wrinkles on the goblin. Spent a few hours on this so far

Goblin WIP

A goblin type thing I've been working on for a little while. Started out as a quick dynamesh concept bust then got a human anatomy study bolted on then started mucking around with sculpting wrinkles. I'd like to get it fully detailed and/or maybe do a costume study but we'll see how far I get with that  

Indian Rhino

A sculpt of an Indian Rhino for the very skilled people at CDM:Studio

This sculpt was 3D printed and turned into a hologram for the History of the World in 100 Objects exhibition at Perth Museum. The exhibit in question concerns Durer's fantastical 1515 print of the animal. I'll try and add a better render and/or photos of the exhibit should they come to hand 

Ai Wei Wei Sketch

A reasonably quick attempt at a likeness, Ai Wei Wei

Duck Pendant

I wanted to make something for my sister for Christmas so I made this pendant in Zbrush and had Lenrose in Melbourne print it in wax and cast it in silver. Julie then cleaned it all up and polished it. I tried to help at this stage by filing off sprues.

Design process

Me filing 

Sprues filed off, you can see the striated surface resulting from the printing process

Julie filing

The finished piece

Falstaff

Something I started a while ago and never finished. An attempt to sculpt a figure in pose with costume. Shakespeare's character Falstaff.
ZBrush BPR render

Unfinished project

A project I started months ago and never finished, it was supposed to be the actor Bruce Spence but I never really got the likeness I wanted, it was useful for mucking around with the new vray skin shader, maya's retop tools and trying out yeti though. 

Freelance project from 2013-14

These are some illustrations I did for PAN in the UK.
Patients that resemble birds. ZB, 3dsMax, Mari, Vray, Nuke, PS.

Global Awards which includes some making of images
http://www.theglobalawards.com/winners/2014/pieces.php?iid=475999&pid=3

Cat

It's a cat

A furry friend (WIP)

Foolishly decided to try and do a project with hair again
It's a slightly stylised Short Clawed Asian Otter
The groom needs lots of work at but I've spent ages getting the hang of lighting and rendering the fur and getting settings for quick(ish) testing and good quality final rendering.
This render is on a medium setting and took about half an hour to render, I desaturated it in post cos the colour map is pretty rough at the moment.
I couldn't get the results I wanted from the vrayhairmtl so this is done with a normal vray shader with a big broad coloured specular to fake the trannsmissive, lifelike quality and another sharp white spec for the direct pings of light. Kind of borrowed from what the vrayhairmtl shader does. The current variation (kink, frizz etc.) values are giving a pretty crappy look around the chest and belly sepcecially, I will look at working in clumping etc to get the hair looking better.

Rupert Murdoch WIP

I must have saved an image of Rupert in my dropbox a while ago, found it while browsing through the other day and decided that I must have intended to model him at some point. Still sculpting in ZBrush to get the likeness and the anatomy right, this is rendered in max. I think the photo I primarily referenced might have been from him getting grilled in the Leveson inquiry, he looks unimpressed. The again he looks similar to this a lot of the time.