About 5 hours.
That’s great work! How did you do the glowing lava effects on those salamanders and that rock creature? It’s really impressive! 
Thanks Black-Tooth. For the glowing lava effect I first looked at the glow shader and then the glow BPR effect. I didn’t like either approach so I just did it in Photoshop. For the monster I ended up inverting the render and using it as a layer mask for the glow effect, and eventually darkening down the rock parts for contrast. Finally I went in and just manually painted a lot of it with the paint brush set to color dodge and increasing the temperature and brightness of the color to intensify it as needed.
For the salamanders I tried doing a cavity mask and filling in with a different material but I didn’t like the results so I just painted all of them by hand with the same color dodge paint brush method.
I hope that makes sense.
i like it, long live the salamanders!
Thanks Lvxifer. I just took a look at your thread and you’ve got some amazing stuff going on over there. I’ll have to try that style at some point.
I got a skeleton in the mail today, so I’ll be sculpting each and every bone in the body. Today I started with the first 3 cervical vertebrae. I thought it was going to be easier than it was. Like one and done, right? They’re all the same. Except they’re not. More spine tomorrow.
Got down to the 7th cervical vertebrae. This is definitely harder than I thought it would be but I’m still into it. Obviously learning a lot about the bones and picking up a few new things about ZBrush in the process.
Looks cool! You have a very ambitious plan. Good luck with that!
Working on a giant lava turtle. Working from alligator snapping turtle reference. His front legs are more molten lava, slowly dripping down. His rear legs are more like rock, like a defensive lineman its tough to push him back. And of course his back is all rock.
I wanted to get him rendered in a scene in mental ray, but this is the first large scale displacement map scene I’ve tried so getting the workflow down was a pain. I’d like to have him finished tomorrow.
that lava turtle will be beyond amazing when you get it painted and rendered! can’t wait
Thanks man. Ran into some issues rendering in Maya mental ray. Mib_mix_color with a glow masked by a cavity map and mia material… Mia turned a weird blue with physical sun sky, even with the sky desaturated. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow but its really frustrating right now.
Started out with a win today when I got the physically accurate lava shader set up in mental ray. I’ll have to do a robust tutorial when this thing is all done.
so looking forward to the finish piece. good luck with the tutorial - you will be able to sell it to a magazine i’m thinking.
Is it just a modified AO or displacement map tied to the incadescence? Alpha as luminance?
You’re not too far off recorgasm. Its two modified cavity maps controlling the weight of two extra shaders on an mib_mix_color node. There’s two light surfaces with blackbody nodes driving temperature and intensity. The cooler rock part is just an mia material by itself. There was a lot of overcranking values to get it to show up with physical sun sky. The idea is to keep it all functioning as close as possible to “physical accuracy”.
Some recent stuff I’ve been having fun with.
