I'm really having fun with this demon character! It was initially just going to be a learning piece but i've add a lot of my own flare to it and spent quite a few hours on it. I'm really loving zbrush now, it definitely has some frustrating points, i'm still not convinced the transpose tools are designed that well, but its become a lot easier and faster to work with.

Here is a couple of screenys from my latest work.

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So onto the next project this time I have a 'grand plan' in mind which should hopefully bring many elements all together in one scene. I'm thinking BIG this time so it will take a while and no doubt I will learn a lot.

I plan to sculpt some characters in Zbrush so I've been working through some more tutorials and I must say I am loving this time around. Everything is coming together much faster and I am finding the tools easier to work with. My tablet is much more fluid to use now as well!

Here is WIP screen shot from my latest sculpt.

Demon Head WIP #1

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After quite a few hours exploring various render setups to try and get decent render passes for my Bruton render I was up against a bit of a brick wall.

All of the rendered elements out of 3ds max were too dark, as if they had a gamma of 1.0 or less.

I was lucky enough to get a response from a user on the CG Society forums who explained that when rendering elements as a 32bit format such as .HDR or .EXR they need to output with gamma set to 1.0 whereas when rendering out 8bit or 16bit formats like .BMP or .JPG you need to have gamma set to 2.2 in 3ds max!

I also found .EXR is a great format in that it can contain all the render elements as separate layers in the single file! Very handy indeed, when compositing  in photoshop. However a plugin is required, called ProEXR

Heres a link to the forum post 

Heres a link to ProEXR

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I finally got around to finishing off my Bruton project. I'm pretty happy with the end result however I am still having a lot of trouble with render passes in 3ds max so I didnt complete as much post production as I would have liked. I'm really happy how the lightning turned out in the end though

I learnt a lot about lighting in this project so I'm sure that will help a lot with future renders!

Heres the first render, i'll render out a few other shots once I can suss out the render passes properly.

Full resolution pic here 

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Over the past month or so I've continued working with Unity3D or more specifically designing some low-poly characters for use in the Unity3D game engine.

Low poly modelling as its own challenges where I need to keep the total poly (triangles) down for best performance but still want to retain detail.

I've also learnt a massive amount over the past couple of months about hand painted textures, and I've definitely learnt a new respect for texture artists that achieve some amazing results through hand paint textures.

A great resource for all things 'game art' is www.polycount.com make sure you check out their wiki site if you are curious about any area of game art creation!

So below are a couple of screenshot! Proof i've still been doing something in the 3D art realm, even though my blog updates have been poor :P

On to rigging and animation of these characters next!

Low Poly Wizard ( Yes I know he's naked)

Hand Painted Wizard Texture

Low Poly Goblin

Hand Painted Goblin Texture

 

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Its been a while since my last post (keeping a theme going there I think)

I have also been a little distracted from my Bruton project as I started exploring Unity 3D with the possible thought of creating a mobile game.

For those who are unaware Unity 3D is a development engine for 3D games and is particularly well known for success in the mobile game scene.

I've spent the last two weeks learning the basics of the Unity platform and more specifically how best to setup a pipeline between 3ds Max and Unity.

I have now created an animated character, with 3 animation clips built using the 3ds max biped system.

I then built a simple scene in Unity for the character and complied the project in the Unity web-player.

You can view my scene and the 3ds max character asset from the link below...

Unity 3D Web-player

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I've been lucky enough to have the past couple of weeks off from my day job, so I was able to get in some good time with my 3D work! I have now completed the modelling for my Bruton project and I have also linked the model ready for posing.

I took my time with this model a lot more than I have done in the past, which resulted in me 'redoing' some sections of the model that I wasn't happy with. Its not perfect, but it is definitely the most complicated model I have created thus far!

Here are some WIP screenshots.

Head

Full Model

Test Pose

Its now onto UVW Unwrapping and texturing.

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