its been a while. this is some stuff I've been working on these days - sculpted using zbrush, and rendered (by my long time co-worker and boyfriend, Dan Ulrich) in maya.
I know its not a common pose, but I saw a horse playing, and really liked that pose. Here's a turntable:
finally two bust, one depicting Amy Winehouse, the other Ed Harris, playing Virgil Cole in the movie Appaloosa
a good friend of mine, Mattia Mercante (a very talented art conservator from Italy - check out his scanning and printing work here) also made a print of Amy with his replicator 2 makerbot:
I absolutely love your work!!
The way you capture a moment is incredible.
I'm really very interested in finding out your techique for the fur on your bear.
hahh, those dogs are really impressive, really liked their ears and the other animals' pose, and yeah, furs and hairs are awesome too congrats to the hard work
LVXIFER, shmud , TeamFox, meanboythecat , selwy, bzsolt , davidness - thank you all so much for your kind words
there is really nothing special about my workflow. I usually make very simple basemeshes in maya, and when i found the main forms using very low subdivisions, it usually requires retopoligizing for example cutting new edge loops around the eyes and mouth to add more
detail to sculpt with (actually now with qremesher it can be easier, but i'm old school for now ), but i don't like to work with too detailed meshes. with the characters i sculpt i use symmetry until i find the likeness that works for me, than pose it with transpose tools.
this is true for the animals also. first i try to find the main forms, big blocks of muscle, shoulders, hips and other joints, etc. then pose them, then add the details. actually i played a lot with the poses. i used tons of images, and videos, and of course real life for reference.
the fur sculpting method isn't too tricky either. i love to use clay build up tool for the big chunks of hair. often rotate the modell to be sure that it works from every angle, and the silhouette works from every angle. when i'm satisfied i begin detailing them with slash 1 -2
and the standard brush with some pointy alpha
as for the rendering, Dan helped me with that, he describes it a bit in dandan's junkyard - its basicly a setup very similar to Ryan Kinglsien's
gnomon dvd - photorealistic rendering in maya mental ray. It doesnt have GI, FG, nor hdri, just 2-3 area lights. Its fairly easy to setup, and its a
really good tutorial, so I can just recommend it. after making the scene once I just have to import the decimated obj-s, re-light them a bit, and hit
the render button. I would gladly share a basic maya file with the setup, but since it's Ryan Kingslien's workflow it wouldn't be very etical.