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).

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

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?

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.

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.

Concept / paintover

What little spare time I've had these past 6 months have mostly gone into getting on top of things as far as the full creature pipeline goes. This has entailed a lot of time trying to learn about vray, proxies, displacement maps, SSS shaders, comping render passes in Nuke and that whole bag of fun. As a part of this I've been playing around with a giant turtle scene, where the idea was to have a city under a glass dome on top of its back.
However, after trying for a long time to get it to look right, I've decided I did not much care for how the city itself came out looking. So, back to the drawing board. The turtle itself is pretty much done. I did a quick render and painted over it to come up with some new ideas. Those tiny submarine thingies are also built already, just need to redo the city and build a mountain. Sounds easy enough, right?

The sketch was done in 5 minutes and looks like it as well. But hopefuly you get the idea.

Quick sculpt and Monster Month

Hey y'all.

Another morning coffee quick sculpt. I also put in a rough start of what hopefully will be the first of many monsters this month. Inspired by Caesar Dacol's ongoing Monster Month, where he sculpts (in clay) a new monster design every day for a month, I thought I'd try doing the same for each week day for at least a while, as long as work and time permits it. I'll keep going with this one tomorrow, then on to another one on Wednesday.