Ben Mauro Sketchbook

[Prevenge]

Here was a small collection of some of the things done for the CDW Wellington event where i did some demos with crazy talented co-workers Aaron Beck and Greg Broadmore for 3 hour sessions each day
for 5 days. I decided to create a project for the event so all the demos were tied together in some way to make things more interesting and also make stronger talking points on world building for IP development.
All of this was recorded and is getting edited together at the moment into training/tutorial DVD’s through the CDW website. Stay tuned!

I have a question for you Ben. And this goes to whomever has an opinion or guidance on the subject…

When you sculpt your characters… especially the ones with these elaborate mouth areas with all the teeth etc…
do you sculpt it just as relief? with no real rear-geometry to the teeth… no inside to the mouth no tongue??
Are these just concept pieces?
if they were animated… and had to do speech… would you cut the mouth area out before or after you painted them?

i see so many incredible zbrush sculptures… and they look like they’re ready to be rigged and fully animateable… but something tells me the eyes can’t move and or the mouth is not a hole… seems you 'd have to re-topo and go through a ton of worrisome work to do the mouth-opening after you’ve preppet it with poly-paint etc…
been curious about this for awhile.
thnx

[blueferret]

Very Cool Sculpts, and I love the textures and colors…

[Ben_Mauro]

Prevenge- Correct, those are just concept sculpts created as 1 piece with a closed mouth, though i think on the beak creatures there was a bit of geo within
the mouth to be able to open/close them slightly. Everything i do is to create and sell an idea quickly, though if changes are needed to be made such as opening the
mouth or sculpting in teeth/tongue etc on one of those creatures there are multiple ways within ZBrush that can be accomplished. On that bottom image you
re-posted with the beak i did just that when sculpting the full body when i was posing it and wanted it to have an open mouth roaring at the camera, though i
probably would do it differently now. On some of those earlier CDW warmups that are all 1 piece i would make the lower jaw a separate polygroup then i could
split that element so the lower jaw and teeth are separate subtools then ‘fill hole’ and start sculpting the mouth interior. That can be repeated for more complexity
if needed, split out the gums, all teeth as separate elements etc. There are also tools for adjusting the polyflow within ZB so things would deform properly when
animated but i am not as familiar with that side of things.

[Ben_Mauro]

Finally got around to building the costume for this guy, done think i posted the initial body sculpt so here it is as well.

Body sculpt done live at the CDW wellington event last Sept., definitely some wonky stuff in there looking at it now! Will go back and refine this if i take it further at a later date.

The costume done in 3D based on the designs i sketched out at the event exploring different ideas that would fit the character.

Playing around with all the polypainting and material painting tools after reading Kurt Papstein’s awesome tutorial in 3D Artist, pretty exciting to be able to model/paint/light the nearly final design in ZB so its 100% finished in the viewport and you just need to render it out, i have explored this in the past but it never seemed to work out, but Kurts tutorial convinced me to try it out again. Still have a few kinks to work out but definitely going to approach things this way more in the future on jobs…time permitting.

Quick detail of the shield used to deflect the sonar from the bigger creature, can always play with material breakup and details on the green panels at a later date to arrive at a ‘final’ design, i think it feels too high tech right now, needs a better balance of wood/metal/glass materials like the initial sketch seen at the top. Will play around more after the holidays.

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[Phosforced]

great work! love the designs!

[Phil_China]

yes, nice design.

[willettfx]

Very Nice Work Ben!!!

[3mm]

Love your Stuff man,glad to see them here!

[Ben_Mauro]

Small continuation of previous post, where some of these individual elements are going from the little personal project. Am in the process of creating a massive scene with maybe 10 or so new creatures all together with the old ones. Will try to tackle all the individual creatures first then it should be easier to pop them back in the scene and pose them all polypainted so i can pretty much just hit ‘render’ and get some nice results then touch up in PS. Here were a few crops of the mockup scene with a few peaks at a couple of the new creatures, will try to get a few of the creatures detailed and painted up before i head back to work next week. More to come soon.

First pass at the alien Theria creature. I’m trying to tie all of these guys together some how, like maybe most of the creatures don’t have eyes or see the world with some form of sonar? So this creature would act more like a prey animal with eyes on the sides of his head. So the large flat planes on his front sides emit sonar left and right from some internal organ (or maybe the petal form on his back emits the pulse and the head area picks up the signal?), whereas the HH creature acts more like a predator with eyes in front of its face emitting sonar forward. I imagine this guy eating more like an ant eater, some long weird tongue coming out the front to eat plant life in the area. Working on the detailed rendering right now, got hit with freelance work so might not get to the main rendering till the weekend. Also wanted to try to do a shot of a herd of these guys walking/grazing similar to some of the other shots i was working on. One nearly down, 9 or so more to go!

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[Xeroapemorphia]

Very Cool!

[Phil_China]

Cool image.

[am3dartist]

You guys have some serious braking through concept arts and design. Well presented…

[Ben_Mauro]

Quick update to this guys appearance. Thought it would be pretty striking to have this characters clothing all pale faded materials, like they use every part of the creatures they kill. Using bones and every part of the animals to fashion weapons and clothing from their skins which fade in the sun on their planet. So his ***8216;grenade***8217; looking devices on his chest and the spear along with other elements on his costume would all be carved pale bone objects. Might flesh this out further in a more refined single illustration and really get into refining all the individual costume pieces***8230;…if i get time.

BLUE -Ornithischia

Quick creature done during my Saturday workshop in Australia, will touch it up a bit later, maybe play with a new color palette, all polypainted in ZB, needs a bit more refinement in the topview shell breakup and need to resolve the areas in-between the large plates. Some sort of herbivore type creature in this universe, wanted it to feel a bit more prehistoric like some sort of alien Ankylosaurus/Stegosaurus type of creature, overall a very docile creature but has a natural weapon built into its back to defend itself with. The idea was that this creatures back would either contain the material they use to make the deflector shields against the HH creature or was just the inspiration to build them after seeing the creature defend itself in the wild. I was trying to keep the color of the back similar to the deflector shield and also make the overall shape vaguely similar, so they could have gotten inspiration from this creatures back to design their defensive tools from and also to imply the material used is in their back or that they found a crystal/rock material that had similar properties as this animal to deflect and absorb the sound from the HH creature.

Tiny update on this guy, not sure how i feel about it as a ***8216;final direction***8217; for the skin/color/patterns but i guess its ok as a start for now.

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[Felon2]

Very impressive topic. I really love your creatures, very smooth, and creative ! I will follow this topic, can’t wait to see more :). Good luck with your project.

[Phil_China]

Excellent design !

[Ben_Mauro]

This critter was sitting on my hard drive for a while, finally got around to rendering up the top view. Some sort of alien poison dart frog type creature that has the ability to glide from tree to tree, this guy is a bit smaller than the green variant and also has a thin membrane between his back wings to help glide/maneuver faster to evade predators. Will be doing a more elaborate rendering of the design soon posed on a branch or something so you can see it in a more dynamic view, or maybe a grey render to show the form a bit more clearly? Similar to other creatures in this world it sees its surroundings with some sort of sonar type pulse, the head is some advanced almost completely circular disc type form, almost like the big radar dishes you see on AWAC***8217;s, so this little guy has a very clear picture of his surroundings from 360 degrees while it is in the air.

A bit hard to see the design with the poison dart frog paint-job so here was the unpainted block-out of the model. So now you can more clearly see the almost completely circular disc type head form, like the big radar dishes you see on AWAC’s…but organic! Will detail him up and make a bit more sense of the design… front wings that are in contact with the ground need more thought and some sort of appendages need to be worked into that area before i believe that this thing could grip onto trees/objects inbetween gliding (have a few thoughts of integrating some sort of frog finger/pads near those two points close to the head). Will try to work all that out before i do the more dynamic pose/render later this month after i wrap up some
freelance.

Vehicle from a project i worked on beginning of last year, just got clearance to show this design. Probably the first vehicle i tried to visualize in 3D to show a Director what i had in mind…then i never looked back, powerful stuff! Lot of things i would do differently now on this from a design/rendering standpoint, but was a fun project to be involved with and look forward to see where it goes. Hopefully much more to show later this year, stay tuned.

And here was the Zbrush block-in i used for the paint-over.

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[Dragon]

I really like these images… mainly the ship, sooooo coooool looking!

[blueferret]

I like what you did with the NYPC image…

[Keaton_Lindner]

I myself am trying very hard to create things like this. How do accomplish such smooth surfaces?! I am aspiring to be a character artist just like this, and your work is actually about the same I am trying to accomplish

[Ben_Mauro]

Synthetically engineered cyborg assassin. Will be updating this post with the body and some quick model renders. Ended up changing so much in the paint-over, almost not worth showing the upper torso model i created. Might go back in and change/refine things based on where the design went in the paint-over.

Done for Danny Luvisi’s upcoming LMS book reprint, he kindly asked me to contribute and i really wanted to design a new character that would give his Gabriel a good fight. He also has a knife mouth, don’t get too close.

It looks fairly humanoid anatomy from this picture but the body design is very different looking, will probably tackle that for fun next to show what i mean.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Last-Man-Standing/120622634669647?fref=ts

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