Another update

BRINK Update

Small changes - crits welcome!

Brink Head W.I.P

Could not help myself. Started this last nite - Slapped on a dirty projection. More to come.

Hardsurface Modeling

Just some stuff I have been working on. I really not getting good results with hardsurface normal maps so trying to find a soild workflow any tips from you guys would be great!

AM Still here

Been working away on a few things one was my Halloween mask which I ran out of time to make but here is some shots.

Also made the generic fire hydrant as a base assets to be used for testing hard surface normal maps and the various methods you can create them.

Few other things but will show them later on.

lazy post

Bit quite round so been posting updates over on the forums but here is a another update

Update

Photoshop Mock-up

I want to take the sculpt into a full character so went all 2D not my strongest point but happy with my hack skill :P

More Mudbox Fun

Just for fun

Need to do this more often

Turntable

Not been working to much on the lower body still trying to get everything looking close to the concept.

Rigged

Hello again, been awhile not made to much progress but have made some important changes. First of I change the length of arms. They were far too long, also changed the topology of the jacket around the collar area. Another change was I wanted to try importing a rig from Maya into Mudbox to help with sculpting.

The plan is to use a layer to hold a Pose and then Sculpt in that pose and once finished remove the Layer to bring it back to T-Pose while retaining the details. Mite not work out that way but worth a try. If not am sure I can just use displacement maps from one pose to another.

Update

This is how he stands atm on the bottom level which is around 10,000 tris. Mite start doing the shotguns before doing any detail just to do something a bit different for awhile

New Topology

I have redone the topology of the head, I know its not perfect but I will fix it once I have finished up in Mudbox.

Head and Hair

Spam

I just got a email from Google spam department, informing me that they noticed spam like activity on my blog :P I will try and make the next update a big one

Now your getting it! :P

STILL not happy with the proportions but made some changes for the better. I been using photoshop to mark of areas and then tweak them in 3d till it looks good from all angles. Just goes to show how far off I was with my initial base mesh :P I also changed the base mesh for the feet and went one with toes just save me so much time.

Think I am now happy with proportions and any changes I make now will be more focused on details, honest

Fixed

Rite I think I have fixed the major problems and can now move on and get into the smaller forms :P

p.s Sorry for posting every silly little thing I do I know these are small updates BUT I like to track my progress so I can look back afterward and see my workflow and find out what went well and what went bad, one thing I learned I liked to do at school.

Used to hate it when my teacher would say " Its not what you end up with its how you go there that matter" now I see what they mean, kinda :P

Your doing it wrong!

I been looking at this and feeling it was off so I took it into Photoshop for a closer look, very quickly I could see what was wrong. I will spend some time fixing the basic proportions before I do any sculpting!!

Starting - Level 1

Going to try and get as much as I can out of each sub-d level as I can before moving on, still more to do on this level but wanted to post anyways :P

Ready Set Go!

First off, I wasnt really happy with how the model was subdividing so I went in and changed the base mesh around the collar area of his jacket. I went in and changed the topology and added some tight loops to make sure certain parts would give a crisp hard edge when smoothed.

I did a dirty uv map ( about 2mins ) just to split of the shells so that I could use the

"auto groups with UV" function in zbrush to make some Polygroups. This will help when I want to isolate a specific part of the mes.

I looked into using Mudox but I found it struggled at higher sub-d levels maxing out at 4 division and going slow, where as Zbrush could run smoothly at a much higher sub-d level (7)

I do meet the hardware specs for Mudbox, with a NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M gfx card but it still goes really slow. Its a shame because Mudbox has some really nice features which I would have liked to give a try!

Anyways, I am now ready to get sculpting!

May have to take a break first as my eyes are over worked these days :(

New Base Mesh Done!!

New base mesh done! All quads and split up into four separate maps. I am tempted to use Mudbox over Zbrush for a change but I need to find out if it is possible to make selection mask via uv shells or some other methods. I really use the poly group masking allot in Zbrush and find it useful and hope mudbox has something similar. Anyone know?

Cheers!

Murray

Roughing the Proportions

So I took my base mesh into zbrush and tweaked the shape a little bit more. He is currently sitting around 9 heads tall the reasons being that these guy are said to be around 8 foot tall in the comic book.

Next step is to fix the base mesh ready for sculpting, rite now he is split up into septate parts and this can be a pain more so with the legs and arms when transposing. Once that part is done I can start with the sculpting! Woop!

New proportions and silhouette

Hello again. Started working on this guy again and wanted to start with getting the basic forms in, the old model was rather flat and lacked the same proportions as the concept art. So I went down to my lowest sub division level and exported it to Maya there I set up a camera with roughly the same perspective angle that the concept was drawn in. Once that was done I tried to match the silhouette best as I can. Fairly happy with what I have got at the moment. Will tweak some more soon before moving on to fixing the topology to be ready for sculpting.

Going to have fun with this one! :P

Till next time

Spring cleaning.

I was cleaning up my hard drive and was looking at some old work and have decided to rework this piece for my folio. It need allot of work but I think this will save me allot of time rather that starting from scratch. I am still aiming for the end of the year to have my folio ready!

Bake test

Hello,

I was planning on wrapping this guy up this weekend but I was getting a some errors when doing my baking tests which held me back working on the high poly more in case it was something to do with the mesh. Also it was really nice out all weekend so tired not to stay inside that much. Well I just finished fixing my problem and doing a quick bake test. So far so good few errors in the maps but nothing I cant fix.

Still need to figure how I will mite do the skirt. Was thinking of doing it all in 2D just to test the work flow.

I do think I will spend a bit more time on this guy and redo some of the poly flow. I debated adding claws to his feet. I tired them but goz didn't like it so much and seemed to much effort for not allot of gain. Can always add them as a separate mesh later.

I am also toying with do another two variations of this guy, one ice and one earth. Should be fun!

Topology

OK so this was my first time using Topogun and so far so good. Really found it fast and only jumped back into Maya for a few things. For example fingers and toes where made from primitives and duplicated along so the where the same size a shape.

I am happy with what I got most of it clean, still will change some bits here and there it help deformation but this is close to final mesh. He is sitting at around 3100 TRI's and am sure I can trim that down at the end.

Next stage is to layout UV'S then refine the shape and texture inside zbrush and photoshop.

After that bake the maps out and call him done!

Last nite I wanted to give a go at doing my own time laps of a project from start to finish, so everything was going well and about 3hrs in went to save just in case my screen capture crashed... well it crashed on save :(

So here is was I got so far, only used Zbrush so far and will take this out to Topogun for re-topo and then do some UVs before baking out textures from the high poly.

This wasn't meant to be a folio piece just a bit of fun and practice of my current workflow but may put the time in to make this a little low poly piece for my folio!

The original concept is by the fantastic PATRICIO MARCELLO BALANOVSKY

High Poly

I have done the high poly and baked out all the normal and AO maps but getting some doddgy normals. I will try and rebake some of them and try a few different methods. I been using xnormal for its speed. I want to move on to something else so mite leave it for later and come back to it later on.