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

Dragon WIP#1

Spent today doing some sculpting, just trying some stuff out on this mesh to see what sticks
I bought Matt Clark's retop plugin Wrapit today so I'd like to get this sculpt looking alright and then retop it and possibly find someone to rig it.

Another unfinished project

Something I started a while ago and lost motivation to finish
A troll made of rock

Peter Garrett Sculpt

A sculpt of Australian environment minister and ex vocalist of Midnight Oil, Peter Garrett. Likeness is far from perfect but I think it's better than my last attempt at a likeness. I sort of feel like this was cheating because he's got such a distinctive appearance. Approx. 4 hours spent on this.

Nicolas Sarkozy speed sculpt

This was supposed to be Nicolas Sarkozy, the likeness is a bit dodgy and the hair makes him look like Sean Penn. Took about 4 hours, sculpted from the base mesh of the little boy sculpt which has turned out to be a pretty useful all purpose base.

Boy Concept

I've done a bit of work on a pose for the boy and a paintover to get a better idea of how the composition is working. All the clothes are quick block-outs at this stage. I intend to fully sculpt all the folds etc. The pose is not quite balanced so I need to fix that. The hands haven't been posed so they look pretty weird, I'm thinking about maybe adding a suit coat and maybe a cap to give a more old timey, private school feeling. That could work to play up the contrast with the oversized, modern backpack. I think I should make it even bigger.

Boy WIP#1

Another character I have started on
The idea was to convey a child on their first day of school, I have the whole character blocked out but have only really spent any time on the head so far. I got the idea from seeing schoolkids with hilariously oversized backpacks and thought it would make an interesting portrait. He's giving off at Hitler vibe at the moment, maybe it's the hair. Also gathering reference images of children on the internet is... unsettling in some way. Observing children in real life is also generally frowned upon.

Horse WIP #1

I've spent a few hours sculptig this horse for a project for Arran Potter.
I've never tired to model a horse before and working the anatomy out has been heaps of fun.
Still lots of bits to fix up and accentuate.
It will be posed and have a rider so I don't want to sculpt too much detail in this neutral pose.


BaseMesh

Orc Wip#6

Some costume blocking and experiments with this character
I'm getting a bit sick of him so I might shelve this project for now and try to practice a bit
more instead of getting bogged down with this.

Orc WIP#5

More detailing work. The legs are a bit messed up. I'm trying some stuff out with the staff to get away from the typical fighting, agressive style of orc. Maybe he's more of a chieftan or explorer or shaman type. The necklace is just blocking shapes to see what works. Doing a lot of the little teriary deatiling to the muscles and folds is new ground for me and I struggling a bit as I make it up as I go.

Orc WIP #4

Some progress on this guy
I'm looking at a lot of tribal costumes to try and go in a different direciton from the normal orc cliche. It's still cliche as hell but whatever.
I'm thinking off adding some greaves on his legs so there's some more interest there and leaving the torso naked.
I'm not liking the spear very much and it was knocked up pretty quickly so I might change it.

Orc WIP#3

Some sculpting and detailing on the face and neck area. Changed the mouth a bit cos it was looking stupid.

Orc WIP #2

Some more work on this character. Posing and sculpting to correct errors with the transpose tool.

Orc WIP #1

Because I haven't been very inspired lately I decided to have a go at the old 3d cliche. I started with a simple base and then retopped it in max and then back to zbrush. I'm currently sculpting it and I intend to light and texture. He also looks a bit generic so I need to give the character some interest before posing and costume etc

Galapagos Tortoise Final

Finished off Mr. Tortoise, finally.
I ditched final gather in favour of an ambient light with occlusion and did a little base very much in the style of the one I did for the Rhino. There's an unfortunate shadow that makes the cactus fruit look a bit 2d but other than that I can't be stuffed fixing it up any more. I have a few days off and I don't want to be fixing this piece the whole time. Depth opf field was done with the Bokeh shader for mental ray, which multiplied the render time by a factor of 5 or something.
Fun times.

A sodding merry Xmas to all!

Another Speed Sculpt

Seeing as I have some time off, I'm doing speed sculpts
This was an attempt at actor Steve Buscemi, it was good practice although the likeness
is pretty bad. The Screengrab has a slightly altered neck which I think looks a bit better

Speed Sculpt

Another Speed sculpt
Some post work in photoshop

ZBrush 3.5 First Speed Sculpt

I just got my Zbrush 3.5 license so I decided to do a speed sculpt.
This was done from a cube, I usually use a basemesh so this was a good challenge.
Once again I didn't use any references because I wanted to test myself a bit.
Took about 2 hours.

Galapagos Giant Tortoise WIP #6

I've done a test pose for the tortoise with a bit of cactus fruit that they apparently eat. The depth of field is done in Mental ray and takes for ever to render. Some of the maps still need a bit of touching up but otherwise this model is nearing the end. If I can figure out a way to get it to render quicker I might be able to do some animations with him. Thanks to Greg Tatum for some useful advice.

Galpagos Giant Tortoise WIP #5

I've started the process of texturing this model.
At this point I've got diffuse, bump, spec and gloss maps on everything and they all need refining to the point where it looks right. The lighting is the same setup as the earlier WIP. I'm liking the head but the neck and legs need a lot of work. You can see where I've started detailing the bump map on the shell but haven't gotten the whole way through yet.

Galpagos Giant Tortoise WIP #4

I've done some more sculpting on this model and also mapped the pieces of the model and exported some low res displacement maps to test that things are working as they should be.
I've comped the wireframe over the top to show the underlying geometry.
I'm looking forward to texturing this guy now although there is a fair bit of cleaning up and sculpting to do in Zbrush first.
Rendered in Mental Ray

Galpagos Giant Tortoise WIP #3

Some more work on this model
Nori had a question from the previous post about the base mesh so I've included a screengrab of the base level.
The mesh is organised for rigging and animation, which is what intend to do with the model once I have exported some displacement/normal/whatever maps. I would also like to do proper texture maps for this guy and try for a little more realism than I did with the rhino. All the details still need refinement but I find it easier to jump around here and there on the model to keep myself interested.