And now it's time for something a little different

So I did a little test for a Mechanism of Action video over the holidays.

The first shot is of a prostrate cancer cell, the 2nd shot is of a tumor and the 3rd is just a cell blowing up. There's no story or actual scientific type thing happening in the video, just a bunch of stuff that happens :D.

Its in HD and looks cooler full screen.

Surface test

Okay, so this is a surface test for a new project I'm working on. So it's the sphere and the dress that we're looking at (I'm still deciding on how I'm going to approach the skin surface).

I'm trying to get a pencil crayon type style happening. I've modified how the shading works, all of the surfaces are flat colored surfaces, then it's being shaded by a black pencil crayon, the shadow that is being cast is also pencil crayon. The background right now has nothing fancy going on it's just a simple lambert shader.

Working on Blade

Been awhile since my last post, I've been working on a couple of projects Blade here is near completion, just some surface tweaks, fix some hair render issues, and rig him so I can do some decent posing.

The goal behind this piece was to utilize the new and old feature sets found in Zbrush 4 (released back in September). So most of the meshes were created (and then retopoligized for a more animation friendly meshes) in Zbrush. Also all the sculpting, texturing, and UV layouts were done in ZB.

Maya was used to create the ammo mesh, straps and buckles, lighting and rendering. I'm also rigging him up in Maya and will create a mini environment to showcase the model.

Character Test

Here is a 5 day character test I did last week, 6k poly, 1 image map 1024x1024 resolution.

I choose the subject matter because you don't see very many Muslim woman who are not a stero type in games, and it's a contrast to the standard semi nude hot gun chick type characters that are the norm.

The character isn't lit, it just has an ambient occulision map built into the texture, over the next couple of days I'll take a couple of hours and throw a spec, normal and some lighting in there.

Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci played Persephone in the Matrix trilogy parts 2 and 3 she's an older actress in her 40's. So her photo's tend to be a higher contrast with some Vaseline on ye'ol camera lens. An effect that I tried to simulate with this lighting. From the thumbnail she should look younger but when you blow up the picture you should be able to see some of her age reflected.

This head was a pure a sculpt done in zbrush, meaning I had never lined up any photos to model just eye balled everything, which was more of an exercise in modeling. The skin was also done purely hand panted using no photos.

I've taken this one about as far as it will go I think, there are always things that you want to tweak and make better, but I'm going to put this one in the done pile.

okay, maybe I ninja'd an update...

Nailing down the lighitng

So this will be pretty much the lighting I'm going with. However I had made some changes to the geo and turned off a fill light by accident, which really impacts the lower half of her face. So I will update it tomorrow with some tweaks. I think I may have hit a weird switch or something because the render times have shot through the roof.

Skin, you can tweak skin forever, so many variables and image maps to construct it. Female skin is so much softer too. The skin for Olmos was easier I think (however with what I learned from this skin I wouldn't mind going back and fixing his up some).

And I scrapped the hair yet again

So I just wasn't feeling the hair at all, so I scrapped it all and just used Maya hair.

She's pretty much done now, I'm sure I'll be tweaking the hair more, and the skin shader, and the lighting. And the lips I would like them a little glossier.

So I have two lighting setups, really the only difference is the back-light from the camera left. MSN/Comment on which you think is better :).

Pretty close to where I want her

So I had some issues with Maya crashing when rendering out my scene, it had to do with the displacement node creating a new render engine and then hair crashing maya out because there was a new render engine.

So I have my model close to done, most likely some modeling tweaks here and there but no major reworks. Some skin shader tweaks also, tho I think you can tweak skin forever and day. I'm happy with how the skin turned out as it was my first hand painted skin. So right now it's my low bar and high bar I guess.

Tweaks I'm going to hit, is the eyebrows, the nose nostril area and the bridge area. The normal map may be reading to harshly right now, making some things look a little too sharp, which is the reverse of the problem I was having before where none of the details were really showing up that well.

Any guesses to who she is? Send me an MSN or post a comment :).

Not much for the long hair

So here is the current state of the head, eyebrows and eyelashes have thickened up. I'm trying to age her up a little also. I've added some new details to the texture.


I'm definitely no hairdresser... Bellow is several hair styles I had gone through and rejected. With long hair I'm finding it's freaking tricky to control all the strands of hair, and most tutorial methods I've seen are shown with really short hair...

So this method was a fail because the hair just didn't seam grounded to the head, the weird kinking on the her right side was an easy fix, but the feel of the hair was wrong. So I scrapped it.


Hair Helmet anyone?


Again these hairstyles are the rejects and I'm just posting my process and problems I'm facing...

Eyelashes and Eyebrows

Added some eyelashes and eyebrows.

The eyelashes on the right eye could use some more tuning, maybe clump both a little more and make them longer.

The eyebrows are close to where I would like them, I can't seam to find where to adjust the translucency on the hair of the eyebrow tho, which I think would help it.

I have a feeling that the eyebrows and eyelashes are going to be constantly tweaked...