Art of Sammy D

After finishing my goblin project, which was all about high-res detail and epic render times, i've turned my attention back to low poly work for a Unity 3D project I'm working on.

I'll definitely get back to the high res stuff soon though as I have an idea in mind for my next project! But for now i'm working on a simple low poly character, i'm again tackling the hand painted textures, which is the biggest challenge for me.

But I'm always so impressed by how cool some of those textures can look. I'll post some WIP shots in a few days, but for now I want to leave you with this little gem I found!

You may note that in 3ds max when working with textures, they appear lower resolution in the view-port window. This isn't so bad when you are working on a rendered piece but if you are creating real-time art for a game engine you'll want to see your textures in high quality in the view port. This little max script lets you control it all via a handle little UI that you can make to a menu or keyboard short cut.

Nitrous Texture Tweaker

I finally completed my goblin prison warden scene. This final render was constructed with Zbrush, 3DS Max, rendered with Vray and post processing in After Effects and Photoshop. The last few stages were a little bit rushed but I'm pretty happy with the final image. Full sized image here

Things are coming along quite nicely on this project, I've learnt SO much!! This test render actually marks quite a turning point in my creative development.
I have now ironed out my Zbrush to 3DS Max workflow. Displacement with Vray works really well if the settings are perfect!
I'll be sure to added some detailed information under the Learning section of this blog relating to displacement once i've finished this project.
So the scene and all the modelling is done! (minus) the eyes for my character.
From here i'll be experimenting further with rendering in Vray and moving onto textures and materials!

Still plugging away at my goblin prison project. I've now pretty much completed most of my Zbrush work for this phase and I'm happy to say I've finally bedded down my workflow of Zbrush to 3dsmax! This has taken a lot of time, experimenting reading etc, but I now have a method that can get great results in Vray for 3dsmax! Looking forward to some great renders!

As a side note I've read a lot of tutorials and posts stating that Zbrushs UV workflow doesn't yield good results, especially when using displacement maps. I must say I don't agree. At least in this project using UV master or even the AUVTiles has worked nicely, even with poly painted textures. Still, having said that, if you are painting textures in 2D say in photoshop then you'll need better UV layouts than the ones Zbrush generates.

So to show off my new workflow, here is some quick Vray renders of the goblins accessories, all using displacement maps on low poly meshes and also using poly painted textures.

Dagger in Sheath

Pants and Belt

Leather Shawl

Leather Cap

Bone Pendant

I've been experimenting a lot with Vray in 3DS Max, a renderer that I have not had much experience in. The main reason why I started looking at this render was I found an amazing site that has a perfect displacement from Zbrush to Vray workflow.

This area was a big unknown for me as I have never taken anything from zbrush into 3dsmax before, so I needed to bed down my workflow before I could fully commit to finalizing everything in zbrush.

The artist who put together this tutorial is Akin Bilgic and the workflow can be found here http://www.cggallery.com/tutorials/displacement/

He also has some really great work worth checking out.

So now i'm going on with creating the accessories for my goblin!

Heres some Vray test renders as well.

Vray Test Render - No displacement, lighting test

Vray Test Render - Subsurface Scattering and Displacement

Been a while between posts, but nothing new there. I've been working on a new project and I said this before but this time it is going to be a lengthy and more complex project. I'm not going to give too much away but I plan to render the final scene out in 3DS Max. I'll also sculpt some parts in Zbrush so there will be a big learning curve on the pipeline between the two systems,

I've been following some sculpting tutorials on Digital Tutors and I've pretty much completed the base sculpt which as I hope you can see is a goblin.

I wanted this character to be frail and emaciated, as opposed to the typical bulky warrior type. I also wanted him to be old, which will hopefully set off the entire scene nicely.

Heres a few WIP shots then a test render of the naked goblin at the end.

Accessories and 3DS Max testing next!

Initial base mesh with minor sculpting

Some more sculpted details

Adding gums and teeth

More detail, sub div 4 here I think.

Base polypaint

ZBrush Render

Hi Readers.

I've completed my latest project! I've called it 'Cool Kitty' it is a stylized portrait of my own pet cat 'Axon' so the coloring's etc match his own.

I mainly started this project to learn more about the creation of hair and fur. Just like my last project this was rendered entirely in Zbrush and all the hair and fur was completed with Fibermesh!

So I haven't posted any WIP shots of this project so I'll string some together now on how the image was created.

WIP #1 - Base Mesh

This is the base mesh as it was stylized I didnt add too much detail here. I also new there was going to be a lot of fur. Looking at this now I think the arms are a little long.

WIP #2 - Posing

Heres where I was playing around with the pose. I wanted something that would express a certain 'feel' I looked at a bunch of images of people winking and cheesy poses. This was the final pose I came up with, but I wasn't sure what he would be leaning on at that point.

WIP #2 - Fibermesh

So the fibermesh ended up being about 5 separate sub-tools of varying length and style. I also used a lot of 3D layers to manage the styling. It was a lot of fun to work through this part. I must say though I found the 3D layers to be a bit buggy when working with fibermesh.

WIP #2 - More Fibermesh

This time more length just playing with it.

WIP #2 - Polypaint

So as with most projects containing something new for me I always find out a better way to do things down the track. If you polypaint the base mesh first the fibermesh will take on the colours underneath!! This would have saved a lot of time for me. But alas I had to paint multiple sub-tools to get the colours I wanted.

WIP #2 - Accessories

This was the process of creating the collar which I created using various 'Insert-multimesh' brushes. You can achieve some really cool results quickly with these brushes. There is a tonne of awesome free ones found here. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?170167-Insert-Multi-Mesh-Repository

I'll post some detail about post production in photoshop soon along with some of my own personal critique about the final image.

Art of Sammy D

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