Garthim head sculpt #007

Heres my take on the garthim head. The design of the face on the muppets were pretty simplistic so I added a bit to improve the design a bit to make it a little more realistic and less "Muppetey"

The body will be truer to the original desin. This was a cool idea for a project. Thanks Cole and Brian for coming up with this.

100 sculpts

No I have not given up on the 100 sculpts. I have not forgoten either.
I had some major symetry issues in the hands of the depraved charater and Ive been working on a way to solve it. I think what I will have to do is retopologize the character and almost completely restart the sculpt. I have spent nights going back and forth between, Mudbox, Zbrush, Maya and Topogun and nothing seems to work right when I transfer details to the adjusted mesh. So it isnt any wasted time because Ive have learned a hell of alot that last few nights. Unfortunately the solution may be to fix the symetry on a low level version of the model and begin the sculpting process anew. Hopefully I can get through that tonight.

february sculpt challenge

So here is a brilliant idea.... fan art sculpt of a character from Jim Henson's "the Dark Crystal". I call the chamberlin, and Brian calls Aughra and Kahi has the garthim. The mystics, landstriders, gelflings are still up for grabs. so I imagine the challenge will begin ASAP 2/9/2011 and go till 3/13/2011 thats a sunday, so you can show final on monday 3/14

Scythe #006 WIP Depraved WIP

experimented last night with my newly created vector displacement maps.
I did a test on the scythe which taught me alot. I need to push the forms of the faces a little bit more before I make them into vector maps. The scythe model is a stand in did in maya. I modeled it quickly and ugly, and I would like to remodel it with better edge flow. But this is the Idea im going for. I also realized I need to make more of a variety of faces.

For the depraved, here is the progress, Im not liking the feel of the feet. I need to figure out what I want to do with htose and Im still having mirroring problems witht he hands. Im thinking a complete resculpt may be the ticket.

old, well... semi old quicky

piff, piff, you young skaliwags! May I present to you one Mr R.J. Nicklesworth Tacklebottoms. Behold! A most glorious example of sculpting vision! If I do say so my self, Oh ho ho, and I do.

Yah sooooo.... I did this a couple of weeks ago and then my computer went KAPUT!!! so I'm posting it now, gonna take it a bit further; moustache, a comb over, jacket, and maybe a pipe.

Faces of reaped souls #005

Well, Friday night I was so exhausted from a long week I crashed fairly early and never even turned my home computers on. Sometimes a body just needs the rest.

Saturday after some beach time with the family I spent the day getting Mudwalker, a plugin for mudbox that allows it to send and recieve models quickly to other programs like Zbrush, headus topogun, maya etc. I had some symetry issues with the depraved sculpts hands. Ive decided that I would like to take that sculpt to full final, with pose, color, the works. So I was using mudwalker to help me use the smartresym option in zbrush. After many hours of testing I think I have a solution to my problem. unfortunately by the time I figure it out I really didnt have time to sculpt.

So on to the faces here. The depraved is going to have a weapon. A massive scythe which I did some quick concept work on and I will post it tommorrow.(I forgot to scan it from my sketch book). This scythe will have the souls of the reaped embedded in the blade, so instead of sculpting them I decided to make a few faces on planes that I can turn into vectors and just stamp them on in the end and touch up the detail.

Anyway I think I need to adjust either the 1st or 2nd one to make it look like a different individual rather than just a different expression. Whats fun about these it that they are quick and easy, and after doing a few I've really started to get a better understanding of sculpting a face out of plane and getting the shapes pulled out correctly.

Depraved sculpt 004 WIP

I wanted to get away from just a bust so worked on this guy for about an hour and a half last night. I didnt get as far along as I liked but do like the direction its going.

I will most likely work on him some more over the weekend. I need to figure out what i want to do with the feet and I really need to get into the hips and legs and figure out the forms a little better. The fingers need major TLC after trying to elongate them.

I really need to figure out what the best way is to distort the proportions in mudbox. Probably the joint tools, but they were giving me hell last night.

Well this is what depraved creature that popped up in the festering lump of rot that is my brain. Man I need to sculpt a happy unicorn with some rainbows or something.

sculpt 003 Alien head

I spent about an hour and 15 mintues on this guy last night. I just started pushing and pulling without a starting idea of where I wanted this to go. This was the result. Some kind of Alien , thing, guy, chick, who knows.

Concept sculpting is alot of fun. Finding out what kind of crap is floating around the cess-pool I call my brain is also quite fun.

I dont think he is evil at all. Just very ugly.

"The Neck" sculpt #002

Well sculpt number two was a pain in the butt. I made a quick base out of zspheres in Zbrush and imported the mesh to mudbox to sculpt. WOW, Mudbox really hates zbrush base meshes. I guess its because of the funky topology and the strange areas that intersect on the mesh.

Sculpt control was out the widow, and it was struggle to get the forms to do what I wanted them to. So lesson learned. If I build a zsphere base I need to retopo it before I take it into Mudbox. Or instead of being a lazy bum, just make the base in maya. Anyway I spent about 2 hours on this and most of that was in frustration.

Old One Eye

I was looking at some Joe MAd art and decided to do something more stylized than I normally do. So I sculpted Old One Eye here. Took me about 2 hours in mudbox. I got tired and decided to call it a night right around the time I started to work the hair. Had a ton of fun doing this though. And he's totally like 37.5% less evil than the stuff I usually do. I guess Mark and his goodie-two-shoes ways may be rubbing off on me....or maybe not.

So I decided that this is sculpt #1 of 100 sculpts in 100 days. Wanna see what I can get done by around mid may. Lets see how many I can actually get done in that time. Should be quite a fun challenge for myself. Get my mudbox skills rocking, and and a nice portfolio of work. Maybe even inspire a couple fools along the way.

2D Demon

More evil stuff. I like evil stuff. Its more cool than happy unicorns. Besides my brain is broken and I dream in evil at all times. EVIL I say.......evil. EVIL. Mark doesnt like evil apparently.

a 2D demon I painted in PS during down time at work. Probably a WIP forever.

Screamer

A sculpt I worked on this weekend. Worked on it off and on inbetween watching baby and doing chores. probably spent a round 4-5 hours on the sculpt. then last night i spent about an hour and a half on the painting.

I was looking at some John Howe sketches he did of the mouth of sauron so I suppose thats why I made an undead no-eyes screamer guy with flames in his mouth. Teeth are seperate geo I previously made. I would like to work on the paint job a little more and put more details in the fleshy areas.

quicky update

so after the quicky on monday I decided on tuesday to go back and do a bit more to the sculpt. so I added more definition to the "muscles", added a few more teeth, narrowed the neck, flattened the temples a bit, added in some "decayed" flesh stringing between the jaws, and just a bunch of general touch ups. OH, and turned on AO. and, I know, I know, the zygomatic is lower on the side of the skull... I fix later ok.

quicky

so I got myself all set up again with mudbox and whatnot so I thought I'd do a quicky sculpt (1 hr), and this is the result.

Departure, final

For this particular painting, its current state is as far as I can get it. It is reasonably close to the scene I had envisioned, an ancient astronaut with his space vehicle standing by, thrusters on warm up sequence. He gives a few words of encouragement to a few elite priests before departure. A crowd of followers below witness the event, some of them are burning bonfires. Hope it all goes well for them. On to other projects for me.

Time to get things on here started again!

Welcome back everyone! Its a new year and its time we get back to work.

To start things off, Im wondering what kind of things do you want to do?
Did you like the long the projects? Want to do more? Less?
Do you want more 2D projects?
Do you want more short range projects?

Personally I want to make it more interesting and not make this so character driven. Id like to do weapons, vehicles and environments as well as more creatures (non bipedal) and of course humanoids.

Maybe something that after a few months of work everything can be combined to make a cool illustration.

So what do you all think?
What do you all want to do?

Please respond right here on the blog if you wanna participate and what you want.

We can start a new project next week.

Kahi

Daft Punk WIP numba tree

heres progress report number three, modeled the gloves, edited geo on the helmies, added some bells AND whistles. Messed around with lighting, reflection, etc... still WIP on that part. Now for the suits in muddy for the wrinkles and creases, etc, not so bad, they both wear the same outfit.

vector displacement

I wanted to try something new, so I decided to sculpt a quick skull on a plane. It was a challenge to get the shapes to come out correctly. it is quite a different way of thinking when sculpting a plane into a 3D object.

In the end I made it into a vector displacment map which can then be used as a stamp. . Its pretty cool. Anything I need a skull on now I can bust out this map and just stamp it on. Of course detail depends on the number of levels on the model. So I stamped the skull onto a level 6 of the human base mesh with cool results.

I enhanced the vector image for viewing purposes, as the image mudbox uses comes out
rather dull.

daft punk WIP 2

second WIP of Tommy Bang Bang.

daft punk

WIP of the daft punk models I promised to do over the break, done in Maya. gonna use the base body in Muddy to do the sculpt of the suits for the both of them. Also gonna try to make the robot baby, but dont got really good ref of the body on that. when the time comes I could use some help on setting up the gold/silver mats, I tried a bunch of settings with a blinn and I got something pretty good going but then I messed it up and forgot what settings I was using, so back to sqaure one, D'OH!