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zBrush busts - End of year examination

For my end-of-year outcome, I decided to sculpt four heads representing four very unique Ancient Greek gods... but with a sci-fi twist!

The images below are subject to change, and the large (read: final) images are about 2600x1900. Or something similar. They're all signed up and ready for printing. Quite pleased with them, though Ares needs a re-render to get rid of that bloody dreadful aliasing.

Ares

Bacchus

Eros

The Eridanus Insurrection - Character Art and Weapon Texturing

TEI Shotgun. Thanks to Martyn for his fantastic high poly model. I really, really hope I did it some justice.

Recruited onto the team a few weeks back, I found myself some free time to help out on an ArmA modifiction. This mod, titled "The Eridanus Insurrection", focuses on the pre-covenant war between the "Innies" and UNSC.

Alongside weapon(s), I also worked on the textures and high poly for the UNSC soldier/marines.

In-game image courtesy of "TheDog". In-engine shots without any of the fancy specular or gloss.

A lot of the work has to be fairly modular, to allow for switching in/out of textures and models.

UNSC Vest Plate. Quite fun to sculpt in, actually. Learning hardsurface in zBrush really helped out my workflow for stuff like this.

UNSC Combat Helmet. Below, you'll see the variant with an added face shielding. There are a few extra variants which make it extra interesting to see around the wastelands of ArmA!

I thought these legs would really stand out here.

Total armour render. No under-layer. The armour is what's important, however!

Thanks to Martyn Lee Ball for his shotgun high poly and low poly!

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Few more ODST pieces here.

Recon helmet and ODST side-by-side.

Lots of different ODST variants. They're actually in the game right now, our coder is tweaking reflectance values. 

The Eridanus Insurrection forums!

Stirls, where the hell have you been?

Not here! I've been focusing a lot on school and stuff. This blog isn't going to be about my personal life and such, but things are damn hectic this time of year! Still working at NGI, in the fulfilling company of Mike and Ryan. 

So, sculpting! Anatomy! What's new?

Well, I've started up the old channel again. Going to post sculpts there constantly now. Here are a few videos to start off your insatiable thirst for zBrush, reader!

Enjoy. Perhaps subscribe? Eh, I don't care.

Lewis Nixon - Band of Brothers

Hey! It has been quite a while. I don't know who checks out this page, but I thought I'd at least give it some touching-up. Here's some work from 29-6-14. I've been well, and brushing up on my anatomy. Damn, the previous anatomy stuff was just dreadful.

Sculpting a likeness hasn't been attempted by me for quite some time! After a while, I became quite pleased with the likeness, though it's not really all that spot-on. Ears and general fat-pads of the face could be improved, in retrospect.

 

Helmet design I worked on. Took a while to solve, but I ended up using a mix of zBrush's "insert micro mesh" tool and IMM stroke tools. 

 

Above, you can see the block-out of his undershirt. Took a while to get a pleasing result with this one, I was still learning the core fundamentals of MD at the time of creation (despite toying with it a few years prior).

High-poly finished. Here, you can see the added pouches, shoes, lapel pin, and scarf.

(above) low-poly wires. I ended up removing the boot laces to conserve polygon count and general density.

This is probably my favourite one. The clothing after taking it out of Photoshop. Got some nice shine to the boots and all that. To create the webbing for the helmet, I used a displacement map.

Final render of Nixon. However, I'll return to this when I've got more free time. Same with the Hangman. There's still some unfinished business to attend to!

Anatomy - Part 2!

So, here's my second blog-post on anatomy. I'm brushing up on it as I await work!

This sculpt took about three hours, but I hope to narrow that time span down to about an hour if possible. Really psyched to be learning this stuff finally. The anterior/superior iliac crest requires a lot of work (hip area), as do the glutes! 

Everything else can colour me pleased.

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12-04-14: Sup guys? It's been a while. I've been hard at work on a game, as the character artist. Unfortunately, I can't post anything until the lead guys say I can, but rest assured I'll post some stuff when I can!

Until then, here are some fun little 1-2hr sculpts I created.

 Pretty cool sci-fi dude. Next up:

That was a bit of an old one. Here's the last thing I'll post for now:

"Hangman" Operator: Part 2 - Game-ready

Here we go! Second part to my Hangman sculpt. If you haven't seen that, scroll down a bit. There's a giant section on each part of the model. Here we go with a next-gen game low-poly model. I say next-gen because It's going to be tough narrowing this guy down past anything below 30k.

Getting there! The shirt polycount is a bit high.

New update: almost done. Just going to work on the helmet and it's smooth sailing.

Final normal bakes. Really pleased with the result.

Working on the texturing now. All of my textures are "hand-painted", in the sense that I use maybe one or two actual textures, and the rest is brushtrokes with different colours. I love this method a whole lot, and you can get some great results, as seen below in my texture pass:

Here's the final model! Rather low-poly for the pretty detailed silhouette. I hope to pose the character tomorrow. See how that goes. I may also try one without the NVGs.

Destiny "Duke" MK44

A friend asked me to create this model for his 3D print in a Destiny cosplay of his.

 

However I took it a bit far and ended up sculpting a high-poly and bake based off of the reference images. Next up is texturing! 

 

 Very quick update on the texture process. I'm going for the grit and damage done to the weapon itself without being maintained.

While I take hints from the reference, I'm not explicitly following it.




Final update on the model! Really happy with the result. Three days of work for a low-poly, 2k map model. Bliss!

 

"Katharine" Survivor

So I finished The Last of Us for a third time this weekend, and it inspired me to jump into zBrush and create a similar sort of feel with one of my characters.

As of today, I've been working on this model for about 6-7 hours. Not bad, I say!

I have no idea why I tried to make a low-poly face first. But it's good practice! 

Here's the near-final anatomical sculpt. First time trying to create female anatomy. Happy with this beyond belief.

 

Left: Katharine with a fancy bra. I used it for reference when placing the clothing.

Right: The rest of Katharine's body, which consists of about ~2 million polys. If you noticed, I copied the boots from the Hangman model, because I fucking hate creating boots of the same type again. Definitely something I've gotta work on.

So today I worked on finishing the full-face gasmask. I also added a hospital patient band to her wrist. Unfortunately I was the victim of a terrible Toshiba harddrive crash, and lost all of my previous increments and saves.

Don't fret! Katharine was sitting in my Dropbox, so I didn't lose all progress. I did have to re-model the tied-back part of her hair.

New update! I've added a whole lot recently. Don't worry, she has a head (along with hair) and hands! I've just left them out right now, as they're detracting a lot from the model. The face, mainly, needs to be fixed.

So, I moved onto retopology and texturing! However, the UV map for her head needed an extra slice. Unfortunately this resides in the center of the chest, and really breaks the texture seamlessness.