I recently finished some character work for the game Afro Samurai…most of the content was sculpted out in Zbrush initially and later rebuilt/optimized for the game in Maya, and textured in Photoshop…I used Zbrush to clean up seams for the textures a bit too…I’ll post a few samples below…I had already posted most of the content on my blog, and found that most of the pics were too large to post here (turnaround renders, ect…)
Wow I was just working on a model of Jinnusuke, too. Great stuff. :lol:
Ths is looking AWESOME ! I’m found of the anime and I’m sure that the game kickass 
I also really love your texturing job on these ! Any chance to tell us how you got the painterly/drawing feeling in your diffuse color?
Great job !
Nice sculpts! I really like the way you did the textures.
Nice work! 
Awesome Job .
Hi Josh! Great sculpts, thanks for posting!
FANTASTIC work! i love em all.
Incredible work. Makes me want to get the game that much more. Loved all the art I’ve seen for that game. Thanks for sharing.
great ! impressive works at your weblog !
holy smokes, awesome work!
this should be on the top row any minute now 
very impressive! i like this kind of sculpt! congratulations!!
Hey thanks everyone for the replies and positive feedback…
Renaud;
as far as the texturing goes, if you can find any notes from this recent GDC, it was fully explained;
We wrote a shader that generates hatch marks, a graphic outline, rim light, among other things I don’t fully understand (didn’t write it, just used the tool)…as far as the texturing process goes, it was simple…after generating an ambient occlusion map, we would use that as the base for the diffuse color; since we knew it was a illustrated/graphic effect we were aiming for, we would mostly just use a wash approach as opposed to a ton of intricate detail…the only manual technique to approximate an illustrated look was to draw contour lines and highlights on the color map, just to push the hand drawn look…much of that was done by hand, but really the rendering engine was responsible for how it came together…we didn’t want that glossy appearance to our normal maps, perhaps just excluding spec acounted for that…
Wish I could go into further depth, but like I said, if u can get a hold of the GDC material, that would explain all,
-J
These characters are brilliant.
Each is a unique individual character, but yet they all compliment each other with a similar style.
I dig the volume of the muscles and fabric.
Thanks for sharing.
The sculpts are awesome…Very unique. The textures on your blogspot are great too. I thought it is the render that gave the game a cartoon feel. Is there still a realtime render trick in addition to the textures being painted in this specific style? Great work
hi it’s beautifull works i love the last man is very to nice
I just found this thread by accident, these are great, just checking out your blog, full of cool stuff. Was the Afro stuff your first foray into ZBrush.
Wow, such awesome models…Excellent works!
Vickramvr,
ye, like I mentioned in an earlier post,…the look of Afro was achieved through a combination of texture painting techniques and a rendering trick of the engine we were using…I wish I knew the details, but just kinda left that to the guys writing the thing…but I know there are GDC notes on the subject…
Point,
Hey, thanks for checking out my stuff…I’ve been using Zbrush since the first day Version 2 was released, and I actually started modeling in Ray Dream studio before I learned how to draw…then moved onto animation master…then splines in 3d studio max, later discovering nurbs and Subd’s in Maya,…all in complete ignorance of 2d, and how much I’d later love to draw and paint…when I started taking some illustration classes I had a blast,…did a bit of sculpture at this school called “Cogswell Polytechnic” which just showed me how making a character completely out of polygons is like trying to make art with boxing gloves,…very difficult to be subtle, ect…and it was like the modeling gods had mercy when I got out of school and images of Orc like characters and some kinda detailed out warthog blew my mind, there was a program that somehow could accomplish all this detail…anyways, u know how the story goes,…got zbrush and could never imagine modeling any other way, but as I got more into drawing I would spend extending periods doing concept art,…and when it came time to model I’d switch back to that…Its like I’ll do some kind of character sketch like the one below, or be provided one, and when production comes around model the thing…
Hi Josh.
your work is wonderful.i really love them.
im 26 years old and im modeler and animator.
my work have alittle problem.i never do drawin and know i konw drawing is important.
can you tell me when you start drawing?
Good luck
omid
