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.

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.

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.

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 #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.

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.

Quick sculpt 12.21.2012

Well, seeing as I've been informed that the world is about to be covered in lava made from aliens and eaten by the mayan god of eating stuff, I figured I'd sketch a quick alien dude.

The Hulk

So, guess what movie I went to see last night? :)

The Avengers, while also containing plenty of other great VFX work from among others ILM, has work by one of my favorite artists, Kris Costa. His work on the Hulk and the huge worm thing was seriously amazing. We got to see a 4k projection in stereo, which is absolutely the way to go if you have the possibility. Loved the movie, go see it. Or we're no longer friends.

I also went straight home and started to play around in zbrush with making my own Hulk model. This is where I left off, but I'll certainly keep on working on this later.

Reelshot - Update #03

Here is where I'm at as far as the character goes right now. At the moment, I'm about a day and a half behind schedule, but I hope I'll be able to catch back up with most of the lag over the course of the coming week.

There are still some minor tweaks to be done to the sculpt, but it's getting there. Not going to do much more detailing on the body itself, as much of it will be covered by clothing anyway. I have also built parts of the set, started setting up camera projections for the surroundings etc; might post some of that later.

Lars

Reelshot - Basemesh : RPG

So, today was the official base mesh day here at the bunker. It's taken a little time to ween me off of 3DS Max after using that at work for a couple of years, but man is it good to be back in Maya. It's like going from from fucking notepad to MS Word. All of the sudden there is all sorts of fonts, colored text and clipart and shit.

Here is a work in progress of the basemesh for the RPG I posted the concept for a couple of posts ago. Still missing the sights and the locking mechanism for the backdraft section (the tapered part at the back end of the launcher).

I'll probably end up copying the locking bolt from the Carl Gustav RFK, since that is a piece of tech I am very familiar with. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with that thing from back in the army; it is a great piece of tank busting equipment, but it weighs a fucking shit ton and trust me, after lugging around that guy for a couple of weeks straight you really feel like showing all 84mm's of the business end of that thing in your mouth and blowing your fucking head off.

Ah, those were the days..


Well, according to the production plan I never got around to posting, I'm supposed to start sculpting the character model tomorrow, so I better get cracking on the base mesh for that. I guess there still is no sleep for the wicked. Or the unemployed.

Lars

Sketch #002

Been picking a little more on this between working on the showreel shot and sleeping. More updates on that later today. Probably.

Lars

VFX shot - shot03

I just pretty much finalized the missile scene for my VFX shot tonight, sans the slowed down heli sounds (hoping I'll be able to fix that tomorrow night). And in the progress I realized that a lot of time has passed since the last time I edited sound effects. Turns out there's a reason they pay people to do that shit. Mine aren't anywhere near perfect, but I guess the result turned out OK, all things considered. The file is somewhat large, but its TOTALLY WORTH IT. Yeah... Lets just say I hate web compression more for each time I try putting video on the internet.

Check back soon for more updates. Lets just say I'm starting to get eager to get going on this reel. I might just need it some day in the not so far flung future.

May the Lord watch over thee and thy cattle. And Mercedes. Or something.

L

Intro graphics

Just figured I'd post part of the motion graphics intro I've done for the showreel. This clip is an unfinished version of the latter half of the animation, just a quick look at the dissolve effect. Try to ignore the crappy web video compression.
Thanks to Andrew Kramer at Video Copilot for the run through of how to do stuff like this in After Effects. That dude has got some hardcore AE chops, I'll give him that.