New Work

[pv3d]

Hello everyone, wanted to share some new stuff! I just recently finished Katon Callaway's "High-End Fantasy Game Art Creation" Workshop over at the CGSociety. Excellent teacher and class -- I learned a ton, not just about the lo-poly pipeline for games, but also about Zbrush too. Think I really got the hang of using layers, doing retopo, making custom brushes, and a bunch of other stuff. Totally have a new-found appreciation for the DAM-Standard and Trim Dynamic brushes with Lazy Mouse!!

So here's the project I did for the class. It's inspired by the work of an amazing garage kit sculptor called Narin, who did a sculpt of Hellboy that really blew me away. Base mesh was built in Maya. Details, paint and retopo were done in ZBrush. Normal and AO maps generated in xNormal. The hi-res is rendered in Octane Render. I used Marmoset Toolbag for the lo-poly.

Final render of hi-res:


Closeup of the sculpt in ZBrush:


Lo-poly Final (it's a little over 13k polys total):


Lo-poly wireframe (retopo done in Zbrush, rigged and posed in Maya):




Haha, with all the stuff I learned on this project, I've been re-doing everything in my portfolio! I'll post those up soon. Also working on a bunch of new stuff that I'll start posting soon too.

OK, thanks for checking out this (long) post. C&C always welcome.

- Phi

[stefanobernardi]

Good job with this piece!
I took the same course last year and it was worth every cent, I learnt really a lot of useful stuff!

[mrthirdeyeching]

Nicely done!

[ioster]

super nice, man! Love the subtle detail in the high poly.

[pv3d]

stefano -- Thanks! Just checked out your showreel - amazing! Yeah, that class was excellent. Loved the Bonner character you did for it.

mrthirdeyeching -- Thanks! Lot of great stuff in your thread.

ioster -- Thanks! Your thread is awesome. Very informative!!!


So here are some spruced up pieces that I recently finished. Used the stuff I learned in the class to try to give each piece a bit more punch. Revised sculpting, new paint, new spec maps, new poses, renders from different angles... just little stuff to try to make them more interesting. Hadn't really used Transpose Master much before this, but I'm really diggin it now. Great tool, very useful! Would love to hear what everyone thinks and opinions on how to improve them more.


Darkness from Legend


Spock Bronze


Mangalore from Fifth Element


Demon Clown


Thanks! -- Phi

[arctech]

These look absolutely fantastic! - Are those Zbrush renders?

[pv3d]

arctech -- Thanks! Those are renders from a program called OctaneRender. It's great. Hey, nice stuff in your gallery. Keep it up!

[pv3d]

Hi All. Wanted to share my latest fan art/portfolio piece. I'm a huge fan of Rick Baker's and Steve Wang's work, so I thought I'd do something based on the Mohawk Gremlin after watching the second movie on TV one weekend. The mohawk ended up being too tall and fleshy, but then it made me laugh so I decided to go with it... think it gives him a punk rock feeling Tried a variation on the color scheme too. Fun project, as well as a good exercise in sculpting scaly skin! C & C always welcome.
Thanks - Phi

[justadeletedguy]

The Gremlins .... I used to love those when I was a kid!!!!! Nice job !

[Framedworld]

Nice job on the shoulders, and nice color as well. I think you could def look at that pose again. He doesn't feel weighted, looks stiff. Also the lips could use some love. How easy is the octane renderer to use. I use mental ray for some of the pieces on my site, does it play well with maya like MR does?

[pv3d]

justadeletedguy - Thanks!

Framedworld - Thanks for the feedback! Very helpful as I'm still trying to get the hang of it. Up until recently, I just left everything in a t-pose Anyway, regarding Octane, yeah, it's pretty easy to use... load your scene, assign material properties, and watch the render update in near realtime if you have a decent GPU. Only annoying this is that since you can't move anything around inside the app, adjusting the position of anything can be time-consuming with super high-poly scenes because you have to go back into Maya, make the adjustment, re-export the scene, and finally reload it into Octane. I use the stand-alone version of it, so there's no integration with Maya. I saw that they released a plug-in version of Octane to use inside of Maya, but I haven't checked it out, so I can't say how well it integrates.

[pv3d]

Hi All. Needed to take a break from the usual stuff, so looking around, I decided to do a foo dog that's sitting on my desk. Wanted to try working more with Dynamesh, so the foo dog is made from a dynamesh sphere. Don't know why I resisted using it for so long, but using it on this project and using it in the latest workshop I'm taking has made me really dig it. Rendered in Octane with their cool new realtime sss node that I've been wanting to check out. Thanks - Phi

[bkcarlson1992]

Your work is awesome. What method do you use for posing, that is where I get lost. I have tried the different methods and seem to lose so much detail and destroy my models. Again great work.

[pv3d]

Thanks bkcarlson1992! I dig your marine character. Yeah, posing is tough... I'm still trying to get the hang of it too. For this particular model, which was just composed of 1 mesh for his body, I just went to the lowest subdivision level and use the transpose lines to move and rotate things into place. But if it were made up of mutliple subtools, I've been really liking TransposeMaster for posing. I like how it gives you a nice merged lo-res model to work on, then transfers the pose back to your hi-res subtools. Give it a try! Thanks again - Phi

[bkcarlson1992]

Thanks for the response 3dpv, I have tried transpose and it is good I guess I need a lot of practice on using the move and rotate tool. This is just Hobby and my real job seems to get in the way (database design and maintenance). :-)'