Clay Renders in Mental Ray

I've become very interested in clay renders this month. I'm doing a little experimentation with some of my models to explore clay rendering in Mental Ray a bit more. Here's a couple of images from my journey.

Digital sketchbook stuff

Working on some busts to get my ZBrush xp up. Robocop took quite a while, mostly due to experimenting with different methods. Omega Red was a quick 45-60 minute speed sculpt to see if I could get the important forms down.

3D Crate

Megaman!

Me and a few coworkers were talking about old video games and Megaman came up in the convo. That's when the lightbulb went off saying..."dude...you should model Megaman". I thought it would be a fun and quick project to work on. I wanted to keep the design simple, something I am not use to doing in my own designs, so I looked at Megaman X for reference. Took a few design pieces from X, and a few from some other cool illustrations I found on the net and here is what I came up with. I'll start modeling this out soon if all goes well.

First dragon illustration

I worked on this illustration while working as a contract production artist at an ad agency...yeah...one of the weirdest assignments I ever got but when they asked me to illustrate a dragon I leaped at the chance to break out a wacom and spend hours doing what I love. Beats pushing around periods and making PDFs any day imo. Unfortunately, the design was canceled so I never finished the concept. But I did get to draw my first dragon...which was uber awesome! My partner in crime, Ben Bologna, did the vector graphics and backgrounds...that guy is sick with vectors!

Colt 1911

I decided that I need to get more texture practice for games so I started working on small items first, i.e props. I chose to model a colt 1911, I already had the necessary references and had an idea on how to model this so I thought it would be good practice to give it a shot again. Today I spent pretty much the whole day modeling, retopologzing, UV mapping and texturing. The textures are at the base level right now. I wanted to try some new tricks with this software called smart normal. In photoshop, I created a pattern to go on the gun. I then exported just the pattern out as a .jpg and brought that into smart normal. Smart normal generates pretty good normal maps of photos. I used that pattern of the normal, overlaid onto my normals created from xNormal and viola, pretty nice pattern for the gun without using ZBrush to sculpt those details in.

Hi res and low res marmoset render posted.

Cloning Facility Project

I have been working on some concepts and models with a colleague of mine and I just got the green light to post some of the progress I have been making on my portion of the project. The assets I was tasked to create were the large and small cloning tanks, cloned cat creature, and computer screen. Here's where I am at so far...

a "What Grinds my Gears" moment...

Last night I was robbed. It was around 2am. I was watching what has been promoted as the "most anticipated movie of the year"… Prometheus. But before I go on, Let me say that the story was pretty good and the visuals excellent!  Now, from the start of the film, I enjoyed every minute of it. It wasn't until about an hour and a half later that the crowd and myself were surprised with the most unanticipated event of the film…a blown projector bulb…that just happen to blow at the most suspenseful part of the story. I thought to myself "This has happened before" and waited for a "movie technician" to fix the projector. 20 minutes went by, nothing but a blank screen. A few minutes later, the angry crowd(me included) were greeted by "someone" in an AMC get up followed by another person wearing an AMC "security" get up. Their solution: "We can't fix the projector. It's broke indefinitely. We can't refund your money. Here's a movie pass that NEVER expires. Have a great night." To them, this was a solution. To me…a robbery committed by AMC. Not only did I miss the movie's entire reason for existence…but now I have a choice between coming back to watch the entire film again just to see the last 20 minutes OR wait until it hits DVD so I can appreciate uninterrupted suspense. By the way, my pass expires next year so it does have an expiration date. Now I'll take the time to personally thank AMC for ruining my 3D experience. 

Traditional Art

Figure Study 2

Now that school is over (and by over I mean...I graduated!!) I'm going back to finish up on some projects and studies I scrapped in order to get my thesis completed. It really feels good to let some of that pressure off...for now that is. I know I am going to want some pressure soon after graduation...meaning...someone hire me so I can do cool stuff for people :). Any how, here's a male study I'm working on.

Overview of workflow

First, I built a base mesh for all character pieces in Maya.

Next, bring low res pieces into Zbrush for sculpting details and modifying form.

I worked on the head separately so that I could get higher subdivision levels without taking the poly count extremely high on the body.

After all the details are sculpted in, I export .obj's of the high res pieces and bring them into 3D Coat for retopo and UV.

Here is the final mesh for the game model.

I used 2 uv sets: One set for the head and one set for the body.

The AO map is baked with the Diffuse map. I used the AO map as a guide to paint more details. All maps are 2048x2048.

Final view of character rendered in Marmoset.

New work in progress

Small update

almost finished texturing this guy. This was my first time rendering in Marmoset and creating a game ready character at that. There are quite a few things I would have done different on this character but I will save it for the next. It's about time to put this one to rest...

Polyphemus

I have been away for awhile working on my thesis project and other miscellaneous events that life has to offer. I did, however, find the time to get back to work on my cyclops. I took a break from him previously so that I could work on my Zbrush skills a bit more.  So the quest to finish the piece has started again now that I am more confident with my sculpting abilities. I also changed the design a little bit. I did a little more research on the cyclopes and their history, and became more fascinated with the fact that they were blacksmiths for the gods. My goal is to create a piece in reference to the blacksmith opposed to the beast.

Mental Ray Render

Here's another render of my female character in Mental Ray this time.

Crystalline: Quest for Kaidus

I created this character for low res modeling practice. The concept was created by an unknown artist. I pretty much found the image online, gave her a name and started modeling her. I then created a few more concepts to go along with the character as well as a very rough storyline. For now, she is on a journey and that's about all I have for the story, lol. I also went ahead and explored some UI concepts for the home screen, creating a concept illustration and UI elements to fit the theme of the game. Hopefully I can come back and completely finish this up.

Test Renders of female character for thesis

Wanted to see how she looked after rendering in Maya Mental Ray. I am becoming more and more a fan of Zbrush's BPR when it comes to these kind of renders. There were a lot of steps involved to get the details out of Zbrush and into Maya using displacement maps. Not as many steps prior to GoZ but enough to make me want to stay inside of maya for rendering. My peeve with Zbrush though is the lighting is setup. I find it far easier to setup lighting in Maya vs Zbrush. Maybe I need to sit down and learn the lights in Zbrush :/.