Over the past 6 months or so I've taken a detour from the 3D art world and been focusing on more traditional drawing. I have a habit of doing things backwards in the creative world so I felt like my traditional art skills could do with some practice and I must say I've really enjoyed the simplistic feel of pencil and paper.
I also recently explored some digital painting in photoshop using my Wacom tablet and it was a lot of fun. I have intermediate Photoshop skills [.....]
Most 3D artists would agree the creating solid UVWs is critical, but also sucks balls. For me personally, anyway that I can get decent UVs created in the fast possible time is a winner!
If you are working with Zbrush and 3ds Max this workflow is fast and can be useful for a lot of situations.
1 - GoZ
Make sure your GoZ is setup between Zbrush and Max and make sure it is working correctly so you can freely send meshes between the two software packages.
2 - Setup Seams
Zbrush's UV Master is awesome at unwrapping meshes with little or no UV distortion. Where is fails is creating seams in the right places! [.....]
First post for 2016!
Late last year I spend quite a bit of time in Unity and modelling some pow poly chars which I will post at some stage.
I lost a bit of motivation and inspiration so I moved onto some character concept work in Zbrush. I wanted to build something quite alien this time and I blocked out a sort of scorpion character which I think turned out well for a quick sculpt.
I've since scrapped this concept and gone with a new [.....]
Managed to put in some solid time over the past couple weeks to finish this one off. I'm actually really happy with how this one turned out. I definitely feel I've improved a lot in a few areas. Always learning though, never 100% satisfied, but great to call another image done.
Workflow
Sculpting and poly-painting in Zbrush, modelling, shaders in 3dsmax and rendered in Vray. Post production in Photoshop
Things I like
I think the number one thing I like most about this project is the [.....]
Slowly found some time to work for on my Gnome character. I had some instability issues with Zbrush when I was trying to apply various surface noise on the hat, so I ended up going with texture based bump and displacement.
I'm now about 1/4 the way through the texturing and shaders so hopefully another update really soon.
[.....]
The idea for my next image came to me from a few different points of inspiration. One part came from the mother of one of my step-daughters friends bought us a small hairy gnome ornament, it intrigued me as it had a lot of hair and a beard and its hat covered its eyes. Another part of inspiration came from chatting to some mates at the pub who were talking about living in a giant hat..all very bizarre I know! Ultimately the idea was born, I wanted to [.....]
I've been working on and off on this character for quite a number of months. I've called it done on 31st December 2014.
I feel like i'm always saying i've 'learnt a lot' doing this project. But I really have learnt a lot! From sharping up the displacement workflow, to experimenting a lot more with shaders and Vray render settings. So ultimately I think I've improved in a number of areas, but still so much more to learn and try.
I'm going to try something new [.....]
