Prophet: Part Deu

What with a colleague (whom shall remain nameless, but who's name starts with a 'K') singing the praises about Headus -on the daily, I thought I'd give it a go on this project. It works pretty good for me, it appears to minimize distortion without including using a texture map and edge thickness as in UV t in Maya. I don't think I'll abandon Maya's editor anytime soon but Headus does work great, and I'll likely keep using it -until juggernaut Autodesk gets with it and puts those features in Maya's UV editor (!?). Headus' interface is cludgy. At this stage for Prophet I've added a sash. By sash, I mean a mandible. By mandible, I mean jaw bone. It seemed to belong. Also, I settled on stylized arboreala akin to the Bonzai tree plants in Japan. All his details have a story, should probably bust that out in greater detail later, but the devilish deathly skull, and the life-oriented tree on his back are constrained to the prophet as he's a mediator or sorts. I'm not particularly attempting to be 'out-of-the-box' with the metaphors on my character, but, meh, why not. Hopefully I can get him into Mudbox this week.

prophet WIP

beginnings of the base mesh

prophet concept WIP

so this is a WIP of my prophet concept. for now his name is Maberath, and the concept is that he's like the forest pope. He goes along with my Apernath character(which I'm thinkin of redoing) on my facebook. He's got these 3 "halos" that float above his head, I'm planning on redesigning those to be more "naturey" like made of wood and foilage and he's also gonna have a staff akin to Gandalf's staff. also considering givin him pants instead of just the loin cloth and he will have something around his lower legs.

Druidic Prophet initial base mesh.

About all I had time for this weekend. Will likely adjust some flow a bit more before putting in Mudbox or... The design is taking into account another influence, the 'Gaiking' character from old school anime like Mazinger-Z, and Giant Robo, albeit more organic in this creature. I'll need to add asymmetry and foliage to the branches. Considering putting in a splash of Egyptian details if I can't find enough Elvish reference. Started looking at some Brian Froud, the artist behind The Dark Crystal. The far right shows a loose sketch, but it has pretty much the broad 'look and feel' I was looking for, worked out. I'm thinking a lot of details will be embellished in the sculpt phase.

Collaborative Discussion

I wanted to invite everyone to come discuss a collaborative project that we may start after this challenge. A lot of people had shown interest in a group project to do so we can have a nice finished piece for our portfolio. It will take place next week Monday (Aug 23, and the place to eat is still open..I'm thinking a place where we can all sit down).

Discussion topics: Theme, Work flow, Concept

If you have some concept art or just have an ideas of what we can build that would be most helpful.

Looks like we will have two prophetesses...

Well, this character ties into a personal project of mine, where I am creating several variations of female characters each with a totemic / idol theme surrounding her.  Regardless, I need a good base mesh to start with so I decided to remesh the female character that I am currently working on (the current one isn't that bad in topology, but I wanted some practice with normalizing the mesh to get good squares for sculpting).  I also have some concept sketches done but I want to work them out a bit more.  Note: head is going to be sealed off in the new base mesh, hair covers that area on the older model so I deleted them.

Druidic Prophet

Concept for Druidic Prophet. Not sure how the forms will materialize, this being is part tree and the vegetational aspects could be anamorphic; shape-shifting into the human, would like to have futuristic like pieces or elvish pieces adorning the bodice somewhere, thought the Inuyasha concept of demon crystals or time crystals, but affixed in a triad would make for more mysticism, it's possible this being doesn't move traditionally, but resides in a forest, and manifests in different trees. Another influence considered is a character from Ninja Scroll is the direction is more asian than medievalish. Going to look at some Banyan trees this weekend. Hide your kids.... hide your wife...

Good news, everyone! Mudbox to Maya working...

Since I couldn't use 'Send to Maya' option in Mudbox, because I had previously rigged the base mesh for posing, I had to separately import the Normal and Displacement maps and build a shading network. I couldn't get it to work earlier, but had some time to figure it out this evening. I'll do a write up on the process for those of us who want to actually take work outside of Mudbox and into Maya for lighting, posing. There's particular things to be sure to do to get the maps to show up, its tedious. A shout to Richard for going back and forth with me on ideas for troubleshooting. Will post better lighted mentalRay renders later, much later.

My blog has goodies (3D tutorials stuff to be exact)

http://ponkurajones.blogspot.com/

I'm going to start sharing some tutorials and miscellaneous discoveries I've made on my own blog here.  I just posted some info on how to get normal and displacement maps extracted out of Topogun so check it out guys...

If you guys have any requests, let me know and I'll try my best to post some stuffs up

Devil ray mermaid

Here's my submission for the Sea creature challenge. I wasn't able to post last night cause I need an invitation. Anyway, here's the devil ray mermaid. The sculpture took me about 3days, everything was done in zbrush. Hope you all enjoy it.


Here's a video clip for the entire sculpting process and compressed into a 7mins clip.

Ursela

I apologize in advanced for not only bringing in a model that's so unfinished (with no head) but also submitting it late.

I box modeled the body in Maya and had to keep the geometry down to a minimum since my computer at home would have a hard time with it. I separated the head so I can add more subdivisions in Zbrush to get fine detail on it. Everything is very roughed in at the moment and needs ALOT of polish.

Unfortunately, I didn't really have much time to detail the octopus portion so I'll just submit the upper body.

I wanted to go for more of a super villain look to the character. I based my idea from Michael Turner's Fathom and wanted to make a more realistic and monstrous Ursela from Little Mermaid.

I tried to put something together that resembles an infection going up her arm that turns into her armor similar to Witchblade but more organic with tendons, scales, and flesh.










In the end I plan on putting armor on her arm that would resemble part of the infection along with spikes and blades that protrude out along the forearm and wrist area.

I'll keep you posted on my progress

fish man final

here he be!

Squid man final... for now

I wanted to give this guy better textures but looks like it'll have to wait, rigging wasn't done either so he's in his default pose. Renders you see are from Maya, with normal and displacement maps active. Did a little trick this time with converting the Zbrush cavity maps into normal maps through GIMP and overlaying it on the extracted normal map. The cavity by itself was also overlayed on the displacement map as well. A quick breakdown of what I used and did:

-Maya: Base mesh, very simple geometry (this had to be revised several times and reprojected in Zbrush
-Zbrush: Sculpting of form and details, subdivided too much, Zbrush couldn't handle the extraction operation later. Was able to get cavity map out though.
-Headus UV Layout: Got really quick and easy UV's
-Topogun: Decided to take the low poly mesh and hi-poly detail sculpt into Topogun and bake the textures there, surprisingly TG was able to handle the density (64 bit helped). Got the normal and displacements I needed.
-Photoshop: Quick edits of extracted maps, etc

August sculpting theme

"Prophet"

So, after much deliberation, and much ideas shot down, I have decided that the theme will be "Prophet".

here are the parameters of the challenge:

1) must be a character, not a device or something like that. in other words, it must have at the very least something of a face.
2) not limited to human anatomy, so it can be either biological or mechanical or both, multiple limbs, no limbs, third eye, no eyes, etc, etc...
3) can be "loosely" based on a world religion, but nothing offensive, i.e. characters on a cross or something like that, nor can it be a parody i.e. "buddy jesus". As an example; the character can be "angelic" but not a straight out angel. the character must have a sense of belonging to the world that it lives in and not some out of place deity walking amongst the mortals.
4) characters must appear to be mystical, wise, magical, fanatical, delusional, etc, etc...
5) must be of your own design and fall into the fantasy and scifi genre, in other words, no just putting a human into some robes and calling it a day. Moreover, if your character is to be human, then it must be bizarre, cartoony, deformed, etc...
6) can be done in any style you want, in any historic period you want, like future or past.


obviously the theme is open to your own interpretation so if you can think of anything beyond the parameters then let me know, or if you have any questions. So what it comes down to is a character that looks like at any moment it could start babbling about the "truth", the "lies", the "end", the "beginning", etc...

the time frame for this sculpt begins Monday Aug 9 and ends Thursday Sep 9. Pose if you can color and render if you have time. So if ya'll are cool with the theme, you may begin brainstormin' but no modeling until after the current sculpt ends on monday.

More Detail

Just playing with pushing some of the details.

testing mudbox video recording feature