Manthing Reborn

[carver]

[attach=134388]Manthing reborn.jpg[/attach]

Hey, all. I always loved this character. I thought it was time to get his mug back out there. I went for a younger, less shambling look. I started with a basic humanoid mesh in Maya, then int Z for sculpting.

[attach=134393]Manthing Zbrush 01.jpg[/attach]

I made lots of subtools for roots and trees in Z with zspheres, retopoed in Zbrush, polypainted everything, Uvs in UV layout, added grass and stuff with paint fx, rendered elements in Mental ray with normal maps, and composited in photoshop. I wasn’t happy with the quality of the renders for the figure,( I tried both displacement maps and normal maps, I got tired of massaging the settings, kinda new to mental ray) so I ultimately went back and re rendered him in Zbrush, and dropped that render over my results from mental ray. The rest of the tree elements rendered fine using normal maps.

I hope it passes muster! C&C welcome and appriciated.

Carver

Attachments

[adio38]

I like it, you really do not see the monsters from the swamps anymore. You said you were having trouble with your Normal maps? Can you talk more about it, any error messages? Or they just did not project right?

[mikala]

I love this character.

[carver]

Hey, Adio. I wasn’t getting any error messages, and the projections were fine at first, but as I loaded down my scene in Maya, details started washing out. Like I said, I am pretty new to rendering with maps, so I chalked it up to user error. This image was pretty good, but as I started adding more elements to my scene, well hell who am I kidding, I was being pretty ambitious in my set up. I wanted the crispness I had in Zbrush, so I just swapped out the images.

Mikala, I hear you. I am totally dating myself, but when I first saw this comic in the mid seventies, I was like eleven i think, it was the first Marvel comic I had ever bought. I was more into Uncle Creepy, and Eerie, and Vampirilla. Manthing was so different from all the Super hero stuff. I love Swamp thing too, but he still almost looks like a dude. Manthing was more thing than man. I will post another shot. I forgot to imbed the first pic in my post…new to this.

[attach=134427]Manthing reborn.jpg[/attach]

[attach=134428]manthing-mentalray test_normalmaps.jpg[/attach]

[attach=134429]Manthing 02.jpg[/attach]

[attach=134430]Manthing 03.jpg[/attach]

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[mikala]

Don’t feel bad on the age thing.
I don’t remember if Swamp Thing and Man Thing ever met up?
Thanks for the new pics. Very cool and ambitious project.

[arunzb]

It’s going great, keep showing

[LjSketch]

rad sculpt and illustration! probably stupid late for CC now but I think you could use some lighting and curve adjustments to bring the focus on Manthing. all in all…I love this though. Sculpting composition and the trees look marvelous.

[Spyndel]

I love Swamp thing too, but he still almost looks like a dude. Manthing was more thing than man.

Nice piece! Love the mossy stuff at the top. I think this piece could make even greater use of fibermesh on the creature.

I always liked Man-Thing design too. If you get a chance though, you should definitely read the Alan Moore Swamp Thing stuff from the 80s. He really developed that character and lore in some awesome ways.

[carver]

Wow, talk about reviving the dead. This was one of my first posts ever here on the forum. Most of the background on this is painted over in photoshop, including all of the moss, because this was like Zbrush 2.5 or 3, so no fibermesh. When I get off of work I will post a more recent version of this guy. I don’t even have these old files anymore. They were lost to a hard drive melt down long ago.

Thanks for finding this old thread. And thanks for your interest and comments.

[Spyndel]

Ha! I didn’t even notice the original post dates, just that it was on the front page. That’s some crazy thread-necro.

It would be interesting to see how you approached this piece today with the advances in the zbrush toolset, though.

[carver]

Ok, way back in the fall of 14, I was part of the beta testing team for the Keyshot Bridge, and version 4R7. I still had the older files kicking around on a thumb drive, and did some updating on the model, did a bunch of fibermesh to see how those assets transferred via the bridge. There was a ton of geometry sent to Keyshot, but it handled it like a champ.Since I was just testing, I didn’t really get around to a ton of post work in Photoshop, so what you see here is basically the render from Keyshot.

Now that I have dug this out, I might noodle on it when I get some free time.

[LjSketch]

haha nice. I noticed the date before posting but I loved it so much I had to write something :). Too bad you lost the files. It’s really good piece, especially from the “olden” ZBrush days! If you do anything post it up man. Would love to see how it turns out.