Unfinished Knight

This is a project I was working on that is now lost due to a recent hard drive crash. All I have is this WIP render. It was a concept for female foot soldier armour based on some Austrian armour I found on the net somewhere. It took me a fair while to design all the gilt swirls as it's not something I do much of but it was fun. The garments underneath the plate and the shield were pretty rough when this render was done. Would have liked to finish this as it wasn't far off but whatever.

School Photo

It's been 9 months since my last post
We've been overseas for most of that time but we're back in the country and I'm back doing 3D things because I don't have the imagination to do anything else

Done with Zbrush, 3DSMax, Mari, Vray

Troll

Every now and then I seem to do a troll-like creature

This is still fairly rough.
Started as a dynamesh, retop in max, CAT rig and some muscle bones in MAX for the pose and then into Zbrush to get it where it is now.
The pose is a little unbalanced so that will need to be corrected
Render in Vray

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

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