Week 8-10

-----------Two Month Break for IITSEC Project-----------

^Week 6 and 7 - More modeling - remodeling shapes.^

^Week 4 and 5 - More Materials, UVs, and details.^

^Week 3 - Materials Tests ^

^Week 2 - Details and More^

^Week 1 - Block In ^

Sci Fi Model Progress and Predator

I've been working hard on my film quality sci-fi character model. Some weekends I work up to 12 hours on it. Unfortunately, I often find myself spending a majority of that time obsessing over proper workflows in ZBrush or Max and learning best practices and what is the more practical approach for a project like this. I've remodeled and re-sculpted several pieces of the armor. What you see in these test renders are merely half of the parts I've created for the character. I have two more files filled with armor and other parts to add into the master Max file.

I've touched up this Predator painting I did in 2011.

Drawing Practice

I've been doing lots of drawing lately. I'll sketch for an hour before bed on my tablet and that turned into one large Photoshop canvas of figure sketches. At work, we've been developing ideas for a possible game so I jumped ahead and did some quick thumbnails for that which gave me the page of robots and cowboys. I've noticed I draw better at work than at home and I have to attribute that to the older Wacom 4 tablet I use on my home pc. The surface is much smoother and that makes it difficult to control line strokes. These were all done either at work on my Wacom 5 or at home on my Surface Pro tablet.
I'm happy with these sketches. I'm seeing great improvement in my ability to indicate depth and I'm blocking in forms much quicker these days with minimal effort. My drawing confidence is at an all time high :)

Sci Fi Sub-d Modeling Progress

 Updates:

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 Worked on the belt for my sci-fi character this weekend. The belt buckle itself took several days to get the clean topology I was looking for with sub-d modeling. I deleted it and rebuilt it three times until I got it right. 

All Max modeled detail so far. Torso imported from ZBrush.

Minor Updates - Zbrush WIP

I thought I'd add some work in progress images of the work I've been creating in ZBrush. There is still a lot of work left to go in this project but I'm making steady progress. Total scene for the suit alone is 43 million polygons. If you're curious what I'm making, check out the drawing in the last blog post :)

New Design Painting

For the past month, I've been working on finishing the design for my futuristic sci-fi character. Rather than starting ZBrush and just cutting up 3d shapes to see what happened, I wanted to take a more organized and professional approach. With the design decisions made ahead of time, I should be able to start working in 3d with far fewer challenges or interruptions.

I've also dug around and found these older drawings/paintings from years ago. You can see the various approaches I was attempting to use for different techniques.

A two hour value study.

Portfolio Work

Modeled and rendered with 3DS Max, ZBrush, Photoshop, Vray, and Mental Ray. Models were all sculpted, textured, setup, and rendered by myself. All the work below is my own. Most photo-based textures are my own with a few exceptions from free texture sources online. Each lantern/pot has a displacement map and normal map adding up to several million polygons per render. Paintings done in Photoshop by hand.

Sculpted in Zbrush and rendered inVRay
Mental Ray Render	Low poly model imported into a real-time renderer.
Low poly model imported into a real-time renderer.	Low poly model imported into a real-time renderer.
	Mental Ray Render
Illustration Work
An Environment Prop Concept