The summer is here, and I’ll have at least a month of free time, getting some things of the ground. To get my juices flowing I decided to finish some old projects that’s been sitting lonely for a long time, and by that be able to soon send a bunch of files to my archive drive instead of having tons of unfinished stuff in my project folder.

I dug up my old Goblin project, and had a session in ZBrush with him tonight.

The old Goblin project with some ZBrush doodling

I kinda liked where he was going now, so I’m gonna continue detailing him for a few hours and add some accesories to him and then see how it all turns out. If I am happy I gonna shade, texture and render him, otherwise he’ll hit the graveyard.

Working Music: The Concretes - In Colour

Just a quickie, here is an old darling of mine which I recently resurrected… Fear his wrath!

This character was like 90% finished back in 2004 for a SpinQuad challenge / thing, which I never had the time to complete. I’ve been cleaning up my old folders and content directories, getting rid of old crap and revived a few things that had fallen into the dark shadows, hiding under the dust, but deserved to be brought back to life.

This Ninja guy is one the latter. Back in march I fixed his topology, made some new UV unwraps and updated his textures and created a new clean rig to animate him. This test render is also from march while working with the rigging.

I’ve always liked this character and have had some great fun animating him when I originally created this cunning Ninja, so I am pretty psyched about finally having the time to get him finely tuned and bring him to full life.

I’ve some diabolic plans of where he is heading, more to come soon…

Get ready for some tough, serious, Ninja action!

At last, here’s a new update of my innkeeper character. Again, it took a little longer than I had expected since my last update, but I’ve had a few commissioned pieces of work that have come in between. Believe it or not, but they take precedence over my personal projects.

Anyway, today I got back in business with this guy again, and here’s the latest snapshot of his current state.

I’ve entered the texturing and shading phase. Since the last post I’ve created the UV’s for him and then spent most of the time building a decent skin shader. The texture maps used at the render above is just some rough placeholders I sketched out quickly to have something to work with when the skin shader reached the final stages. The color map is pretty wild and I’ll remake it from scratch for the next update, and other than that I used a simple normal map to get some structure going on. I’ll remake that one as well.

The skin shader though, am I pretty happy with now. It consist of a large node network built up around 2 SubSurface scattering shaders, 1 OrenNayar shader, 1Blinn shader, 1 Reflection shader and everything mixed together with some mixer nodes and gradients. I’ve tested this shader pretty carefully and it seems to hold up in most lighting environments.

I wanted to get this shader perfect before starting to work with the texture maps for real, so well, here I am. I have a photo session I need to do this weekend for a totally unrelated project, but other than that I think I’ll have enough time to start working on the real textures and post another update shortly.

Working Music: Babyshambles - Shotter’s Nation

I had some time tonight to continue working with this guy, so I finished up the modeling process of this project. Now the fun can begin!

Since the last post, I’ve made tweaks all over the character, but I’ve mainly focused on the face to make him look a bit more interesting. Also for these renders I added a quick and dirty rig, so I could pose him and not have another boring T-pose render. The rig is far from finished, so he doesn’t deform perfect yet, but it was okay enough for these renders.

Alright, time to start texturing and create the shading for this guy. This is what I have been looking forward to the most this time, so I can’t wait to grab my Wacom pen and start painting. I will also fix the hair during this process. Stay tuned for another update coming soon!

Working Music: Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out of Season

Here is a few updated images of the progress of my Innkeeper character. I didn’t have time to work with him until today again. But now he is starting to come together after this session.

I’ve got rid of the strange pointy belly and added some more volume to it as well as some fat around the waist where the apron runs. Also I modeled a dagger for him and added some more details to the face, arms, hands and robe. The symmetry from the first modeling session is now about to run into the history land and I have started to get some more randomness to the different sides.

I fixed some edgeloops as well this time which I was not that pleased with earlier, and it’s still pretty low poly for the amount of details. I have been thinking of using ZBrush displacements for him, but I’ll pass on that this time, and stick with normal maps in the end for the finer details.

I am not completely happy with him yet, so I’ll take him for one more modeling session for the final touches before I get into texturing this guy. Really looking forward to that part, as that’s my main purpose with this project.

Working Music: Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

I just wanted to post a small update. I’ve had a very busy week so far, so there haven’t been so much time to work with this guy. But the modeling is starting to get in place. I need one more session with him and then the modeling should be more or less finished.

I have two more accessories left to model for him and some additional details to add to his body. I hope to be able to have that session this evening.

I make this project to improve my texturing skills, so I wanna spend the most time in that area. But I have also dedicated quite some time now to explore a new flow for my detailed modeling. I have experimented with a new method that I kinda am starting to like a lot.

LightWave 3D -> ZBrush -> Modo -> LightWave 3D.

My flow goes like this, I rough out the overall shapes I am looking for in LightWave, his body and his different pieces of clothing. Then I bring the meshes into ZBrush, one at a time, and start sketching and sculpting out the details, like wrinkles in the clothing. When I have something I am happy with, I export them out in hires into Modo. And there I rebuild the clothing from scratch again, using the hires mesh from ZBrush in the background. The Pen Tool in Modo in quad mode with a background constraint is just wonderful for this work of creating new topology on an existing mesh. So by doing it like this I get a pretty low polygon mesh, with an excellent flow of edgeloops with as much details as I can preserve modeled in, carefully laid out in Modo where I need them. And when I am done in Modo, the model goes back to LightWave to replace the first rough draft version.

Working Music: Beirut - Lon Gisland

I have another new project in the pipeline. A personal project where I want to perfect some techniques of mine. Mainly in creating lots of details in the models while keeping the polygons to a very low amount. But also to some extent texture painting.

So here is the first quick draft of a character called The Innkeeper.

This is mostly a rough draft of this character. I’ve modeled the actual body and head in LightWave to get the overall look and proportions where I want them, as well as blocking in his clothing. His robe is where I have started doing some more work.

I have got quite some details modeled into the robe, while still maintaining a very low polygon count, so I am relying on a very nice topology carefully placed where needed for the details while still having good edgeloops so it’s animation friendly.

I am using ZBrush to sketch out the details I want in his clothing to then bring the model into Modo to redo the topology exactly how I want it. Retopologizing can be a pain, but I find Modo’s tools quite quick and intuitive for this kind of work.

I’ll continue modeling this guy all day, so a new post will follow shortly with more details.

Working Music: My Spy vs Spy Remix Album (Around from an old project)

Alright, Destrachan is finished and posted to my portfolio pages.

I ended up modeling some sort of dungeon environment to put him in. I could probably have spent some more time with it but I wanted to finish this project, wrap it up and move on to new challenges.

I was about to make some animations with him, but I just have got to many things to complete right now, so I’ve put that part on ice. I might revisit this project in the future and add some animations. Time will tell.

Anyway, I’m right in the middle of a another project , updates on that one will be posted tomorrow if not some unexpected events occur!

Tonights working music: Anna Ternheim - Separation Road

P.S. Someone recently asked me why I always end my blog postings with the music I’ve been listening to. Simple answer, music is very important to me. It inspires me and I really can’t work efficiently without my music in the background. So the music plays a major part in all the work I create, so that’s why I feel to share the music I choose to help me set the mood for each session. Maybe my taste will influence someone out there to discover new inspirational music.

Here we go. I finished painting my little guy in ZBrush the other day. So here is the final result rendered in LightWave 3D.

When I was at it, I also created an animation rig for him. So I can pose and animate him. Nothing fancy but all the basic controls needed are there. Some Inverse Kinemtics controllers for the legs, arms and the tail and just a Forward Kinematic for the body and head.

As he is completed now I have started working on a scenery where I can put him, and also make a short animated sequence in. Stay tuned for the next and final update of this project.

Working Music: Detektivbyrån - Hemvägen

Just a quick update, I’ve done the first pass of painting on the little guy, so I just wanted to post a progress image.

It’s getting decent, but I need one more session to work on him before I am happy with the textures and shading. I have done all painting of the skin texture so far in ZBrush and haven’t had any need to bring it into Photoshop so far. I will probably do some minor touch up in the end there I guess, but ZBrush has been just great to paint textures in. The above render is made in LightWave 3D, I didn’t bother to turn on the displacement map for additional details for this test render.

Well, I’ll continue painting this cute little pet today, and then he should be finished to be let loose in some scenery.

Painting Music: Gogol Bordello - Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike