I thought I would drop in a few earlier progress shots of the sculpt taken from Zbrush. I will sort out some more recent ones soon
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I really like the touch shark in her face. it gives her a unique look.
yes, i relly like his face. Good job !
Great design and nice sculpt
Thanks again for the comments.
It did help that Tim and Chris had a relatively clear idea of what they wanted and the Shark like head was a core part of that.
Plus Tim had done some great concept sketches for me to work from and if something wasn’t quite working in 3D he would resketch it to make their ideas clearer or we would work together along with Chris to find an alternative which really helped out a lot.
It was also good that Chris and Tim were open to suggestion as well and encouraged ideas.
I found it really nice way of working and liked how the creature evolved over the course of the project and the end result after it was all put together.
I don’t think Tim will mind me posing up some of his sketches
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coooooooooool
Amazing work folks, I have huge admiration for indie stuff which I also like to dabble in myself. Cracking job, well done.
Thanks Mal for posting these. I’m Tim Feeney, and I also wrote and co-directed the film with Chris Wilson. This turned out better than should have been possible with no budget, but the hard work of these two guys to get the creature into the shots was beyond description.
We allowed Mal to just do what he wanted in some of the areas, as long as the larger details were kept in tact, and overall, he made excellent choices that added to the creature and enhanced those details. He’s put so much time into this, and I can’t thank him enough. Chris put some much time animating and doing post on this that I can’t thank him enough.
Thanks to everyone commenting, we’re all glad you enjoy. Try giving the movie a shot!
while this isn’t exactly my type of movie I’ll definitely purchase the DVD. so much effort has to be acknowledged with hard cash.
the purchase process seems a little odd though. once you click the buy button, you get directly to paypal. I would expect shipping options/info and adress fields etc… before paypal. do you ship to europe?
Chris is dealing with the DVDs I will message him and get him to send you a PM when he is on. I am sure he will be able too
Sorry Julian, I’m a better director/animator than I am a web designer (the site is as professional as I know how to make it)!
Yep, we’ll certainly ship to wherever, just follow the instructions on the site (I think we have four different ways for you to purchase one, including our kickstarter page here http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/497466389/james-vs-reality?ref=search ) and I’ll get a DVD out to you that day. The movie is good fun, thanks so much for the interest!
I have been giving my site a long needed overhaul the last couple of days and did some renders of the creature with no textures so I thought I would pop them up here as well
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thanks for that. I’ll get it as soon as the next check is in.
Very cool. It must be a treat to see your work with life breathed into it. The model is nice. Would love to see some more of the process you went through as a modeller on this project. Keep up the good work man.
Thanks. Yeah it is brilliant to see it brought to life.
I can tell you my process but this is my first time doing this kind of work so it may not be very efficient and there will be people on here who will probably be better suited to give you a decent workflow but this worked for me.
First I make a simple base essentially just taking a box extruding out arms, legs, neck, tail etc with enough loops to pose and stretch I am not too concered with topology at this point since I will not be using it for the full process just to get the basic size and shape.
I take this into Zbrush and use Transpose master to pose and rough out proportions and put it into a pose to work on.
I export this then retopo the model with more workable edges I also make sure the scale is ok at this point.
I bring the new mesh back into Zbrush and start roughing out the creature getting all the big forms in there and do a bit of back and forth with Tim and Chris to make sure the proportions and the overall look are going in the right direction. By the end of this stage we had the overall look pretty much there.
I then export this and take it into topogun to retopo again only this time the model will be for animating so I pay more attention to the edgeflow etc and make sure it has everything Chris needs to animate with it. I will also unwrap the model for texturing. I take this back into Zbrush and reproject the highres details onto the new mesh.
At this point I will export displacement maps and a basic ambient occlusion and send those and the low res to Chris so he could start working out a rig and his shots.
I carry on sculpting and once all the details are there I took a mid res over to Mudbox to texture I just work with Chris and Tim again to make sure all the the creature is looking the way they want. Making sure the details they need are there and adding more if they are required for certain shots. I can just keep sending Chris updated Displacements and textures during this process. At the same time I was also trying to set up the vray shaders for the creature.
During the process there were a few issues getting things like displacements working but I managed to solve them easy enough with a little playing around. I was also having to cope with working on a temperamental laptop which liked to close applications for no reason. Overall it was a good learning experience for me.
For those interested the zero budget indie movie and winner of best sci fi at Dragon Con 2011 James Vs Reality was released for free on youtube last night. If you like a little crazy SyFy style madness and have 25 mins spare check it out and if you do enjoy it please feel free to spread the word. Oh and while I am at it I couldn’t have done this creature without Zbrush so thanks pixologic
Thought I would add some progress shots sorry they are a bit random I did this well over a year ago on an old laptop and this is what I was able to scrape together
a few more. I thought I better point out that initially I was moving back a forth between Zbrush and mudbox as I was using Mudbox for my texturing and doing some early tests.
So if any screens are in the mudbox viewport that is why I thought I best make it clear before someone pulls me on it.
I used Zbrush for all the sculpting work on this and mudbox was just for all the texturing final film renders were in vray.
the EARS! 
the EARS? you’ve lost me