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.    

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