Posts Tagged ‘Art’

Alright, time to post another speed doodle, I’ll keep these babies coming until I’m completely satisfied with my speed vs quality before moving on to make complete character projects with the new techniques I am developing for myself.

This is approximately a 4 hour sculpt from the first drawn ZSphere in ZBrush until the final textured render in LightWave 3D, as seen below. Let’s call it a small Sunday evening project.

Click to enlarge

Of course, it’s far from perfect, but with the small amount of time spent, I’m pretty happy with it. I could tweak it for a few more hours to make it shine a bit, but that would defeat the purpose of my speed modeling/sculpting/texturing/rendering sessions.

I started this time as well by placing a few ZSpheres and then converted them to an adaptive skin, ie. a polygon mesh. I tweaked the low poly mesh to get the proportions somewhat how I wanted them, and then just kept going by subdividing, detailing, subdividing, detailing and so on, until I had reached about 2 million polygons. I didn’t use any references but just kept going and let the character evolve by itself as I went along and the details started to come through.
A few screenshots from the different stages of my sculpting can be seen in the image below.

The progress in ZBrush, from ZSpheres to detailed sculpt

I spent around 2 hour in total with the sculpting part of the character. At this stage, I would have retopologized the mesh if it was a real project, so I could animate it properly, but as this wasn’t the case I exported the low poly version to LightWave together with a displacement map.

Below is an ambient occlusion render of just the mesh with the displacement map in LightWave.

Male Head - Speed Sculpting - Ambient Occlusion Render

Well, well, then I spent around 2 more hours, painting/creating the color map, specular map and the bump map in ZBrush and Photoshop, as well as setting up the shaders and lighting in LightWave for rendering, which ended up as the image at the top of this post.

I’m getting closer to move on to bigger things, but I’ll probably make an additional doodle or two in the coming week.

Working Music: Joan as Police Woman - To Survive

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Texturing, ZBrush

I took a few hours tonight and had another speed doodling session. I worked from my imagination with this one, with a goal set to as fast as possible get a decent looking character. I really need to get a speedy workflow in modeling characters for some of my upcoming projects, so I’ll probably make a few more similar doodles around this theme.

Click to Enlarge - Quick LightWave Setup and Render

The image above was created from scratch from the first polygon to final render in about 3-4 hours. This was mainly a ZBrush project, but I did end up rendering it out in LightWave 3D at the end. If I had spend some time on bulding a skin node network in LightWave and worked a bit on the hair it would probably have ended up pretty decent looking, but I’m saving that for the next time.

Anyway, I started this project by making a few ZSpheres and sculpted and pushed around the mesh from there, going up in level of detail now and then, trying to capture the basics of the female facial form as much as possible. Check out the image below for a few screenshots from different times in my sculpting process.

ZBrush Sculpting Workflow

At this stage I felt I had got most of the structure down as I wanted it. As sculpting from a few ZSpheres in ZBrush doesn’t create a decent topology, I included fixing the topology to my workflow this time.
To fix that, I roughly painted out directly on my character how I wanted the topology to flow, somewhat close to what I like, and then I used that model with my paintover as a template, building my new topology on top of that. When I had my new topology in place, I projected my sculpted details back into the new mesh. Here is three additional screenshots; The original topology - My paintover - The final topology.

Click to Enlarge - Retopology Process in ZBrush

Alright, the third one looks much better, so to end this session I made some basic texture painting as well. I didn’t bother with painting any Subsurface Scattering, Specular, Diffuse maps and so on this time, I just wanted to get some texture down and painted a simple color map. Here is the color map rendered in ZBrush with a basic skin shader applied.

Finished Texture Painting in ZBrush

And to close out this doodling session, just for fun, I exported the model out of ZBrush and brought her into LightWave. I made a quick and dirty wig with some hair strands, just a few minutes worth of work, and then rendered out the image at the top of this post.

Well, that’s it for this time. I shall return.

Working Music: Markus Krunegård - Markusevangeliet

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Texturing, ZBrush

A 3 hour speed sculpting.
I haven’t used ZBrush for a while, so I doodled around in it for a few hours today, to get the groove back. The image below is the result of a couple of zspheres and then just playing around, sculpting out the basics for the female form. I wasn’t going for accuracy or realism this time, just trying to get the shapes down and having some fun with it.

Click to Enlarge - ZBrush Speed Doodling Session

I could probably go on for a few more hours, keeping on refining and improving on her looks, but that would take the speed out of speed doodling. When I ended my sculpting session I exported her out of ZBrush together with a displacement map, and made a quick and dirty render in LightWave 3D, which is the render above, trying to capture at least some mood.

Actually, I think it’s pretty healthy to do a doodle now and then, to give myself some time to explore some new tools and techniques in my applications which I might not dare trying out when I do real projects. I’ll probably try do this somewhat regular to work on my speed and nail down better techniques.

Sculpting Music: Reyn Ouwehand - The Blithe, The Blend and The Bizarre

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, ZBrush

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Creature, Sculpting, Work in Progress, ZBrush

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.

First Texturing Pass on The Innkeeper

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Shading, Texturing

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!

Untextured render of The Innkeeper

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.

A bonus render with some quick and dirty hair

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Modeling

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.

The Innkeeper - Front View

The Innkeeper - Right View

The Innkeeper - Left View

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Modeling

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.

Update of the Innkeeper - A small pouch is added

The Innkeeper - More details added to the clothes

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

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Modeling, modo, Sculpting, Topology, Workflow, ZBrush

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.

First rough draft of 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)

Tags: 3D, Art, Character, LightWave, Modeling, modo, Sculpting, ZBrush

Alright, Destrachan is finished and posted to my 3D Portfolio.

Destrachan - The Final Render (Click to enlarge)

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.

A closer look at the model

Destrachan - Front

Destrachan - Side

Here is a few more renders to easier examine the model without any specific lighting or environment elements to distract from looking at our guy.

To the right you have two textured renders of him from different angles where I have posed him on a stand.

And below we have two images with renders of the model without any texturing at all, to better see all the details I’ve sculpted into him.

Destrachan - Before Texture Painting (Click to enlarge)

Destrachan - Clay Render of the Beast (Click to enlarge)

Wires and the UV map

Destrachan - Wires

Destrachan - UV Layout

And if anyone is interested, here is another two images, one with the UV unwrapped layout I created in LightWave 3D for him side by side with the acutal color map that I painted.

The other image is just an overlayed wireframe from the base mesh I modeled to use as a starting point for my sculpt, on on top of an occluded render of the same mesh with the displacement map applied to it.

I guess that pretty much wraps this project up. The complete process from when I started this project can be seen here.

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.

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Portfolio, Render