New Showreel and Portfolio site

A couple of days ago, I finally got around to posting my new website, along with a sparkling new showreel as well. Head over to stranden.prosite.com to check it out!

High res orc warrior render

Here is the final image of the orc warrior, now in super high res deliciousness! Heads up, might take a little while to load. In the progress of posting the turntable and breakdown video to Vimeo as we speak, will post the link here when it's up.

Closeup

Finally done

Holy crap. It's done. The turntable is still rendering its last frames as we speak, but the stills and the model itself is finally done. Enough yappin', lets see the goods. The video will be up sometime later this week.

Lighting tests

So, the model is pretty much done, so I've been spending the day starting to set up the lighting. I originally started to go for a normal high contrast, rim lighty type setup. But I sort of fell for the winter-ish diffuse light coming from this HDRI from sIbl, so not sure what direction I'll end up going in.

Other than that, I still need to put in the eyebrows, as well as tweak the spec maps some.

Skin texturing in MARI

The final texture for this project is starting to take shape, hoping to be able to get most of it done tonight so I can start messing around with the SSS shader tomorrow. The texture for the body itself is made up of three 4096x4096 patches for each shader channel, so 18 texture maps total when all is said and done (diffuse, subdermal, epidermal, bump, reflection amount+glossiness, displacement).

Tricky part so far is getting all of the different projections to blend together nicely as far as brightness and color go.

When the base texture is done, I plan on tweaking it to a more olive type tone, as well as putting in some tattoo details on the left arm side.

Displacement map tests

Finally got the displacement maps for the body itself working properly in Maya. Apparently, when you combine 3 texture maps (one for each UV patch) using a +/- Average node, you have to pipe it into the vray displacement node via a luminance node.

The turntable mentioned in my previous post is ticking away when I'm not using the PC (which is about 27 seconds a day these days).

Aaand done

Finally finished one of the 2 pieces I've been raving on about. Still need to render a spin of this one, but all the bits and bobs are in there now, and the still image gave me a good opportunity to try out some grading and color choices in Photoshop. Hope you like it. If you don't, I'll probably start crying. Please don't make me cry.

Final graded version

Clay

Ungraded render straight from vray

More SSS testin'

Did some more tweaks on the SSS shader and the texture maps themselves today. Was looking very rubber-masky, and while the latest tweaks takes out some of the subsurfacy goodness we all love too much, I think it looks a lot more realistic this way.

Eyebrows still crazy (vray fur), eyelashes way to dark and opaque (exported fibermesh from zbrush).

SSS skin shader tests

Man, skin shaders are a lot of work. My inner render dude is loving it. My inner sculptor is crying a silent tear for all the details that get blurred out by the SSS.

Almost there

Here's a couple of wip grabs from the two pieces I've been working on lately, the first being one of the test renders I did earlier today of the orc model. Still some tweaking to do on the metal shaders, as well as getting the body itself textured etc, but it's still a major relief to finally have all of the pieces present in the maya scene.

I just did the count, and jesus christ, with all the displacement maps, spec, glossiness, bump, and diffuse maps, and with many parts using multiple UV patches, this thing now has exactly 100 texture maps applied to it. Stupid, right?

The second image is where I'm currently at with the skin textures for the monster bust I posted last time. What you're feasting your eyeballs on here is an ortographic screengrab of the flat shaded base texture in Mari, from which I'll be deriving all the textures for the SSS skin shader except for the displacement (diffuse, subdermal, epidermal as well as the two specular maps).

Expect more updates over the next week or so as I try to finally get this thing done.

L

quickie 09 monster bust #2

Taking a brief pause from Mari and the seven hundred textures left for the orc project, I started playing around with blocking in some high frequency skin detail for the monster bust / quick sculpt thingy.

Spent most of last night trying to take some high res close up shots of my own mug to use for the skin texture on the orc. While looking at pics of myself at night is already one of my favorite passtimes, it does leave you with feeling somewhat narcissistic. I also made a soft box for my camera flash using toilet paper. Yeah..

Quickie 03 - Orc #7

Playing around with some vein work tonight before bed. Just about ready to send the last pieces over to Mari.

quickie 09 monster bust #1

Just a work in progress screen grab of a quick little thing I've been playing around with as a distraction from the never ending orc warrior model.

Quickie 03 - Orc #6

Still working on getting all the textures and displacement maps out and into maya. A lot of shader work, bit of a struggle but learning a ton. Hoping on getting everything render ready this week.

Quickie 03 - Orc #05

Yeah I should probably change the name of this series of posts, months and months hardly count as "quickies".

Here is a quick update, starting to put things together in Maya, setting up shaders, displacements and whatnot.

Quickie 03 - Orc #04

Quickie 03 - Orc #4

Quick update on the orc. Got some hands and bases for some big ass shoulderpads in there. More to come.

Quickie 03 - Orc #3

Just a qucik update on the on the orc sculpt. Just delivered a bunch of projects at work, so hopefully there'll be more time to finish this going forward.

Quickie 03 - Orc #2

Quick update from this morning. Been real busy, not had any time to work on this since the last time, just half an hour this morning messing around.

Quickie 03 - Orc

Messed around in zbrush for about an hour before work today, sketching on an orc. Ork?

Quick Sketch

Just another quick morning ditty from yesterday, smiling alien dude what has glowing crystal in his skull. Because why would'nt he?

Speed Sculpt and Not So Speed Sculpt

Just figured I'd post a couple of things I've been tinkering with these past couple of days.
First is a quick alien bust thing I did tonight, 1.5 hours or somewhere around there.
Second is a body sculpt I'm working on for more in depth use, more on that later. Still needs tons of work, and I'll be trying out making all the gear inside of zbrush this time using only extractions and shadowbox.

Quick sculpt

Quick little ditty I made tonight. Now I gotta pack and get on a late night train with all the other clinically insane hobos that use public transport at night.

Ecorché

Just a quick ecorché I did tonight to brush up on my now severly dust covered anatomy skills. The image I used as base is one we were supplied when I did Scott Eatons amazing anatomy course a couple of years back.

Concrete dome texture done

Quick update, finished the texture for the dome over the weekend. Exported from Mari as five 4k textures for diffuse, same for bump map. Only need a quick reflection glossiness map and I'm ready for rendering.

Next stop, Turtle City

So, I'm finally closing in on ending the turtle project. Just thought I'd post a few of the iterations that have come and gone for you all to see.

First one is the original idea, a city within a glass hemisphere. Spent a whole lot of time trying to get the city to integrate believably and look ok, but ended up scrapping the idea.

Second was having a mountain on top of the turtle's shell, with a city on top within a smaller glass dome. Spent a lot of time getting up to speed on texturing in Mari, but in the end I couldn't find any way to make the mountain integrate well onto the turtle model.

This is the one I'm ending up using. Kept the gate from #2, as well as the dome setup from #1. No more city.  Now all I need is to finish up texturing the concrete hemisphere (it's concrete now, not glass), stick the submarines back in, light the window slits and hit render. Off to comp.

I'm not sure if I like turtles anymore.