Rockin' some Rocks

Just a rockwall done for practice one sunday afternoon. Trying out some new techniques, as well as Marmoset Toolbag 2.

Happy new years!

Polycount art jam presents: Porco Rosso!

Polycount has this art jam thread going on where they rotate through themes every week. This week's theme was Studio Ghibli, so I did a bust of the dreaded flying pig Porco Rosso!

Blocked everything out in zBrush and then brought parts into 3Dcoat and Maya to tighten them up a bit. Then I did a nice soft polypaint pass and brough some screengrabs into photoshop for some color adjustment goodness. Fun times!

Fatty The Pirate

I think this guy has shown up in a previous post or two, but I decided to sit down one day and texture him. I tried out a new approach to handpainted textures where I make a base diffuse lighting pass out of the green channels (up vector) of a Bent Normal map and a PrtP map, and make a cavity map out of a normal map to bring out some details. Then I just painted skintones and such and blended them with the light pass. It turned out pretty nice, I'll definitely keep using this technique.

Trying out a neat technique.

I saw a really clever technique in a video by Ryan Kingslien and had to try it out. Instead of sculpting on top of a flat featureless basemesh I made a quick wire armature with zSpheres and then used the InsertSphere brush to add "lumps of clay" that I then stretched and deformed into the different muscles and big forms. Essentially emulating how one would work with clay in real life. It's a really obvious way to work when I think about it, and the tools have been around since zBrush 3 so I have no idea why I never throught of it before.

Here is the video I mentioned by the way:

Just a window.

Updates have been slow. Moving out and getting ready for the Massive Black Workshop here in SF.

Today I made a Window. Huzzah. Trying to compile a set of MultiMesh brushes in zBrush through this project, that should save me some time in the future.

Big ol' backlog of stuff.

All right, been too busy to post lately. Here is a bunch of stuff from the end of the semester:

The ecorche is done, which is the project that has absorbed most of my time this last month. Every muscle and bone has been modeled out, although the proportions are a bit off here and there. 

Creepy Spider dude thing. 3 hour sketch experimenting with alphas.

Urania the greek Muse of Astonomy and Philosophy. A midterm project for my Myth and Symbols class where I had the option to make a piece of art rather than write an essay. Rendered with vRay.

Base for the hair and cloth was done with zSketch.

 Fishman, another quick sketch.

 Experimenting with the Unity engine's Terrain system.

Little toy people

Saw a guy at zBrushcentral who used zBrush to design vinyl toys, so I decided to give that a try.

Rendered this guy in VRay and gave it funky colors in Photoshop.

This is just the zBrush viewport, I might render him later once I find a good way to transfer the polypaint colors.

Experimenting with zSketch: A Sphere thingy.

So I figured out a way you can use zSketch on a polygon mesh rather than just a zSphere. It's ridiculously simple, you just append the zSphere to the tool you want to draw on and enter zSketch mode. So I had fun with a sphere and some radial symmetry. :)

As soon as I get on a stronger computer I'll bake this out as a Unified Skin so I can bring it into Maya and give it a proper render. I need a really high resolution setting to catch all the detail and this computer just chokes on it. :<

Big fat update.

I keep forgetting to update this blog, so here is a big pile of what I've been doing lately.

Skeleton is almost done. Just need to finish the feet and skull, and fix some proportions.

Elaborated more on the scar of this guy.

Experimented with some Mental Ray features. Not really noticable in this picture. Details here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=970700&page=1&pp=15

Did a bust of Disney's Jafar.

A shitty arm study.

And experimented with some zBrush alpha features and texturing techniques.

 Which I recorded a video of, gonna start doing this for my sketches from now on.

So that skeleton in the bottom of the previous post is part of an Ecorche for my Organic Modeling class. Here is tonight's update on it. Proportions will be fixed once I'm out of the zSphere stage.

Decided to sit down today and just finish this bastard. Obviously not really done, because there's no fine detailing like damage and dirt, as well as straps and chainmail. But I need to move on. I feel I figured out the workflow well enough from this.

Dude in armor part 1

wanna try out some hard surface stuff in zBrush. Here is an early concept sculpt I'll be working off.

EDIT:

I don't feel this warrants a new post so I'll just edit it in here. 

This is what I'm getting out of this process. Still pretty minor but it has a lot of potential.

Cloth study.

Worked all night on this. So tired. No comments. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Hard Surface Final, lowpolied and textured.

This is why I haven't done my sketches the last week. Been compiling my work for GDC.

Organic Modeling Homework Assignments

Here are two homework assignments from my Organic Modeling class. Heavily touched up in photoshop to give them that nice nextgen feel.

Unproductive.

This has been a distracting week. I've dropped the ball on the daily sketches.

Here is what I did today. A Combat Survival Army Tactical Rambo Knife, done 100% in zBrush to test some hard surface tools and techniques.

Also my roommate Jacob asked me if he could rig my anatomy study dude, so I retopologized him and put him in a T-pose. He wants to do a muscle rig so I tried to have the topology conform to the musculature. Time will tell if I was any successful at it. That thing has some really weird loops...

Oh, and I baked a normal and AO map and put him in Marmoset for fun. I see why everyone loves that tool, super easy to use and gives pretty nice results.

Anatomy study and silly armor.

Did an anatomy study, thinking about putting some armor on him and making him into Sandor Clegane from Song of Ice and Fire.

And here is some doodling I did to try out a workflow I saw in Eat3D's Hard Surface 2 DVD. 

Merry valentiones!

Heart, haha.

Pollywog

Other homework kept me busy today so just something simple today. A cute widdle pollywog.

Trying out a new technique.

I saw a very interesting post by Magdalena Dadela on Zbrushcentral where she did an amazing sculpt of a girl in a straw hat. Her approach to doing the straw hat by weaving zspheres much in the same way you'd weave straw or willow inspired me to try the same.

My weaving skills aren't as impressive so made a pretty crummy looking basket, but I learned a bunch from it. :)

And I braided Mr. DemoHead.ztl's hair. :D