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.

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.

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 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.

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.