Colour Fustrations

After fighting with mental ray most of the last week I've finally got a displaced model with a basic colour map to show you. Obvously there are still quite a lot of things missing. Teeth and eyes being the obvious omissions, I still need to do a lot more work on the textures, detail the colour map, add specular and adjust the shader.

Displaced

I've spent the last few days trying to get the low res maya model to displace currectly, in other words so that the maya render loses as little detail as possible and looks as similar as possible to the zbrush model.

I think I've finally nailed the settings in mental ray and here is the result of the test renders.



This is a pretty good moment as it means we can be sure we can get a good render off of the lower res model that I'll be skinning which, in turn, means I can start getting some joints in there as a rig and animating it.

Colours

So this it the kind of colour scheme I was thinking of, trying desperately to avoid greens and browns.

Its just a quick laydown of colours with no details done but I do quite like it I think I'll keep the eyes a really bright colour so that you can really tell when its looking your way and make the claws and the teeth a really high contrast colour like the charcole on its back so that they stand out too.

Full Facial

No posts yesterday, couldn't really see due to the evil holiday cold I've picked up, but a little better today so I thought I'd put some detail into the mouth and add a little bit more polish here and there.



Given that the two weeks are almost up I think I better call the model "finished" in the sense that I'm going to stop doing anything else to it. So now I am going to get on with the texturing. You'll notice the teeth aren't done yet but I have a timesaving plan to do a few variations and replace the stand in ones. save me doing all of them individually.

Put your hands up in the air!

I've been playing about with adding a little more detail to that hands. I've made the claws rough and warn, though might have gona little too far and added some wrinkles where the fingers flex.

Horny

I've spent a while trying to create a good horn/bony scale brush alpha for zbrush and accidentally created one I liked so much that I felt I had to get it out of my system or would end up overusing it on my final sculpt.

Anyway, this is the result of my comical overuse

Its all in the details

After a few days off I've started back on the details the back, eyes and legs/arms have had a pass.

Details, details

I've started throwing some detail on to the model, experimenting with alphas and the stencil brush. Its not looking too bad I think but I want to get it looking a bit more rugged than it looks now and add a bit more character.

Helping hands

No update yesterday, sorry about that. But I have got the final areas "fleshed out" so to speak so we can move on to the rigging/texturing/heavy detailing stages as from this point on the model is unlikely to change much.

Happy Feet

Roughing out the masses in the legs and feet. Still no detail yet but I want to push it as far as possible at this LOD before moving up

Picky picky

Mini-midday update. I've worked a bit more detail into the head and shoulders and a load of little tweeks all over the place.

Baby Steps

Quick update, finished for today, I started putting in some course muscle and bone features to help give me an idea of how its all going to fit together and spent a little time roughing out the underlying structure of the face.

Preperation is everything

Well, here I am again. So far I've not had too much time to spend on them, all I've done is prepare the mesh's by creating polymeshes and subtools. Both of which will let me quickly hide and reveal big blocks of the model, enabling me to work on a more focused area and let zbrush run a lot faster. This is what the polygrouped version looks like.

Making senseble groups at this point can really help later on.

The Journey

After looking through a lot of my old stuff I decided I didn't really want to post anything from it. Instead I thought I's just jump straight into following two projects I've been wanting to do for a while. They are a little bit similar, one subject is a t-rex and the other is a dragon. The initial base models I've done, both created in Maya will both go through a process of detailing, rigging and animation, hopefully producing some nice showrrel work by the end of it.

In the old tradition of Blue Peter, heres two base meshes I made earlier.

The first thing I'm going to start on is getting a cool looking high res model out of ZBrush using these two models as the starting point. Once I've got something worth showing I'll post some pics.

The Rising Sun

Hello

Not entirely sure how this works or what its going to look like once I post but lets just run with it and see what happens.

I hope to post some of my older work and then get into a habit of posting any new stuff I do. Unfortunately I dont have any stuff here I dont think so you will have to wait a little while to see some of my stuff.

Cheers

Rich