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).