Tuesday, December 14, 2010




I posted the concept art first, so you guys could finally see what I was generally going for with this project. Since I only had a couple weeks to work on this, I didn't get around to the little adornments and what not, but I was happy with what I got finished so far! My favorite brushes during this one would have to be Slash3 and Clay Buildup. I'm going to work on some poly painting first to see how it works out, but if it doesn't look good enough, I'll try a UV Master unwrap and conventionally texture her after I add the last pieces.
The final product. The hair took work, but I got it the way I liked it. I used a sphere tool in Maya and began pulling out vectors downward. Then I went into zBrush and doubled its poly count which also smoothed it out. Then went back to Maya and did it again, and back to zBrush again, etc.

Getting him in this pose was a bit difficult, but it was possible. The sword is supposed to bend and such, but there was a polygon error that made a shape poke out irregularly when rotated. But this is good enough to make me satisfied with this model.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Peacoat: Sword edition (Week 13's progress report)

The sword that will detail my guy in his peacoat. I designed the sword in Maya after the human spine. The handle would be where the hips are located. I sharpened some of the edges to give it more of a "cut" feel. I don't think there is much need to change this in zBrush. Next version will be my final version with the man in the peacoat.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Peacoat: Hair

Bad hair is bad. I used some of the raking tools and movement brushes, but I couldn't get it to mesh into hair. It will take a lot of time to get this fixed up but hopefully I will be able to make this look decent.
I've been also working on a weapon in Maya, so most of the attention is split in half.

More Mike


He is almost complete I really like how he turned out :) There is still plenty of detail I can add.

Kvothe Clothes


Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Project 5: Bunker

Here's the final version of my environment.  The base mesh was created in Maya then sculpted and polypainted in ZBrush.

Below is a shiny version of the final sculpt just so you can see the detail clearly. Total time is somewhere between 7-12 hours.  I used the Slice and Smooth brushes to make the crevices between the wood planks and the ground. There was a brush for making a wooden walkway as seen in the trenches so I used that and the alpha it came with; nothing special there.  Everything else is just a combination of zadd, zsub, and smoothing with the Standard brush.  Finally, I used the Crumple brush to add a... Crumply texture to the ground.


The polypaint took a couple hours to complete.  I started with the light brown texture across the entire thing then added the concrete and dark brown textures.  Finally, I added a wood texture for the planks on the ledges of the trench, and black in the middle of the craters to make it look more like a scorch mark.










The pipeline was definitely much quicker this time around.  I still made a few mistakes but I definitely avoided the ones I made on my first project, and managed to turn it around in less than a day's worth of time.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Bunker: ZBrush

I've been working on the square wood portions on the sides of the trench.  They are a bit harder to sculpt than I thought.  I'm having some trouble keeping it hard surface near the more organic surface of the ground.  I keep forgetting to use masking to help during sculpting.

Come Thursday all the detail should be sculpted.  Texturing will be easy.  I intend to add some scar marks from explosions to spruce up the scene a bit.

Monday, November 22, 2010

Mike in Sculptris




I am currently working on the rest of his finger nails, I think i have finished the basic's of the feet. Last thing to touch up on is his mouth. Then I'm planing on adding a bag with Boo's feet sticking out of the bag, but I really like how it is turning out and I really like working in Sculptris.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Bunker

Here is the base mesh for an environment I will be detailing and texturing.  It's a bunker with trenches surrounding it.  I'm not using any reference material.

Column 2 of the poly count is actual, column 1 is total for both objects;  the smaller one is smoothed which is why the total poly count is so high.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Peacoat Week 9

Got a person and got some pants on him.

I used some wrinkle effects on the coat, but they aren't noticeable as of yet. I'll be using that tool more extensively. Nothing out of the ordinary for the pants- took 1 week to make it and I didn't try to spend too much time on detail. It'll be eventually perfected as well as the coat in the final few weeks.

Things left to do: Shoes, Hair, a Weapon, and a pose.

The Ninja 2


This is the most recent version of the ninja and as you can see he is painted somewhat and it is before I UV mapped him. Somebody got me interested in Poly painting so I went to town on it. This is what I ended up with. As far as the suit is concerned the harness is pretty awesome but not colored right at all, the knee pads aren't colored either, and the suit looks pretty good in that material. That is where it is at for now, enjoy.

The Ninja


First off, I know he doesn't have pants. I know, I know, I know. He will have pants by the next time you see him. This is suppose to be more of a modern day ninja. The look I was trying to go for is wrist guards over both wrist and a thick armor of Kevlar that is covered by a shirt. On top of that the arms are covered by an underarmor type shirt that is form fitting and rubbery. Obviously you can't see the texture right now.

Korean Solider Final


This is the final bit of the model for the Korean Solider that I have been working on. The character needs to be UV mapped and textured but the model as a whole is complete.

Saturday, November 6, 2010





It's been a while since I updated with my Seaunicorn, but either way it's finished up now. I decided to polypaint it instead of dealing with my ridiculous unwrap (I deleted my low poly versions..it was bad). I have to say though, I really enjoyed the polypainting feature in Zbrush over normal texturing...it's much more intuitive. It'd be nice if all texturing could eventually be like that ;3

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Insect Polypaint

This model was definitely a learning experience.  I had a lot of issues with the mesh during the sculpting process.  Overall the Polypainting is quite fun once you get into it.  I threw a TV dinner into the microwave and half an hour later I remembered it was in there, but only because I got hunger pangs. haha

The computers at school can't handle loading my model for some reason even though it's at ~8.4 million polys.  Weird.



The colors are a bit bland but since it's an insect, it can't stray too far from dark colors.  I did try a wide range of color schemes and textures but I ended up liking this most.  I spent about four hours or so texturing this, most of which was spent on cycling through textures after I decided the previous ones didn't fit.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Peacoat Week 7

I took a couple of steps back and redid the details on the collar. I have also gotten the inside of the coat to display as well. The absolute hardest part about this week's details was definitely getting that collar to work out. I used the pinch, move topology, standard brush, inflate, flatten, and mallet tools to try to get those touches right and make the collar actually fold over itself. Despite all my efforts, I felt like I could've done better. Next time, I will either make it a separate layer or extrude it in Maya. Either way, I'd like to get started on some pants.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Fish


Here is the next step that I completed with my fish, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to show scales but I think after losing my project a few times i have finally gotten the hang of this program.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Insect Final Mesh

During my process of adding more and more detail I learned a few subdivision techniques (like turning smooth on and off depending on my desired outcome).  I also learned the importance of a mesh with equal or similar poly density throughout the entire thing.  I noticed the legs on my creature were very easily sculpted while the back area was more difficult because it had far fewer polys to manipulate.

For my next project I will be polypainting it.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Fish

Well this is my fish. I have had some trouble along the way but I think I am getting the hang of it. I still need to fix a few things but once I start using higher details for scales I think this will really look cool.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Project Week 5


Week 5 almost done.
This is my scuplt, I added the hell hand, still needs some improvements, then my next steps is poly paint it and retopologize and render it in the marmoset engine.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Peacoat Week 5

This is the current version of my project. It took a lot of topology crafting in Maya to do this. Other than that, I used mainly the smooth and standard tools for drawing out the details. I decided to carve even the collar in the coat instead of making it a separate entity.

Sadly, the only thing that's missing from my coat is the double sided layering- you can't see the inside of the coat because it only displays on the outside. Once I get that figured it, it will look much better.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Insect

Some people thought this was a crab or something when they saw the untextured base mesh haha.

I suppose it could have been, but I turned it into a beetle of sorts.  I didn't get as far as I wanted to for this second project.  These are screen shots of detail up to the third subdivision.  For my third project I will be continuing on with building the detail in the fourth and fifth subdivisions and I might try to add in some spikes or something on its back.

SeaUnicorn

So here's my Seaunicorn sculpt. There's an extra piece of armor that I drew on him in the concept that I'd like to add in eventually, but I didn't get around to it this time...his fins and face were quite tedious. >_<
Also, I don't know if my name's going to be correct at the bottom of this post, so just in case: this is Alissa ;3

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Peacoat Clothing


For my project, I decided to model clothing for the Male Model mesh found in Doc Sharing.
A peacoat is cylindrical in shape all around so I thought it would be the easiest thing to do as a first project.
Even at the end of week 3, I found that keeping a sleek and round shape is quite hard (as can be seen from the sleeves).
This is just the base model- there are no buttons, pockets or any texture on the coat. Luckily, I got the collar in.