Helmet Development

Had alot of fun creating this helmet, Starting with an inital blob around my characters head to give me the rough size it needed to be, I worked into it cutting it up into manage sizes and using my reference to flatten certain parts to start to get the rough look, I then went through each piece and sculpted it, remeshed it and projected the orginal detail so I had a nicely remesh sculpt with a very similar amount of detail. I went back and forth from Zbrush to maya, becasue sometimes it was just quicker to hop into maya to scuplt some of the smaller parts.

Front render XGEN test

I decided to give a grey/white specular to his facial hair, This is really noticible on the chin and you can see a nice effect breaking up the jawline sillhouette with the XGEN, I really wish I had a little more time to play with the XGEN, but due to time constraints I've decided to work with it more in one of my next projects, I decided not to use the XGEN on the eyebrows, I quite liked the look of them as they were, and I knew it would take a little more work to get realistic eyebrows using XGEN which is time i cannot spare atm. Im defintely feeling I may keep this as a base model if I quickly want to have a play with XGEN in the future.

Tweaking the initial XGEN

A few quick renders just checking how the XGEN was responding to the lighting, 

The Arnold hair shader is very responsive to the lighting, and actually reflected abit to much blue, so I toned down the spectacularity initially, but there was a real flatness created with this method, so after a little tweak I got to a stage with I felt still gave the glossiness of the hair, but didnt distract the eyelashes.

REALTIME RISE Oculus Demo!!

This realtime oculus rift work is so inspiring, I originally checked out the link because of how cool the cyborg model looked, but after seeing this tech demo I couldn't believe the potential that the rift is opening up with gaming and virtual reality experiences, It's definitely making me think more about exploring the rift and its integration into pipelines, with its release meant to be later this year im excited to see if they retain the standard in alot of these tech demo's, and when they will be released onto the market!

 

Amazing realistic models

Saw this model on CGSociety and checked out the artists portfolio on ArtStation (a new and really cool way of viewing artists portfolio work!!

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/courir_cgworld

Some absoloutely amazing artwork from Teruyuki and Yuka, The work orginallyu caught my eye becasue of the cyborg influence, with my current project 'The Lonely Road' im been checking out alot of Sci-fi influences and you can feel that resonate through their portfolio, some brilliant life like models, go check it out!! Here a few more stills!

Lighted with XGEN

This is a soft blue light scene of my face, I tweak the lighting to try and bring out the blemishes in my characters face, I really like the cold, surface skin broken feel that the texture and lighting create, there is also a little XGEN on the beard and eyelashes and head, XGEN is really fun and intuitive, but I can see that it may be tricky when referencing and keeping responsive, Its still a little buggy, and often has 'write-locks' and permission problems when saving out files which caused a few problems, but I'm still planning on using and referencing it into my final collab piece and my character turnarounds! 

Setting up shaders in Maya

My first time trying to setup eye and SSS shaders, I can say I am happy as I can be with the time that I've given myself, I definitely see this as a stepping zone to being better on my next model. I struggled with the eye setup a little more than the SS shader, I found the SSS shader setup is fairly self explanatory, and through playing with various amounts I found a SSS that I was happy with. The eye shader I found a little more tricky, there were a few techniques on the internet that I read, but I couldnt find much on getting a strong setup using Arnold, Ive learnt more than I knew, and I know my eyes will be better next time roumd

Generating sculpt detail

 I really liked this technique, using my Albedo layer, and choosing to mask crevices of the image gives you a highly detailed mask over your model that can capture alot of pour and blemish detail that will obviously line up with the albedo perfectly, This plus my underlayer of Pours and skin differences gave a nice worn face.

With bloating the unmasked parts very slightly, you can get pour and hair detail, I found any extra detail now was free detail, and I could soften out anything that didnt quite work.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Electro Skin FX Shot Build

Check out this breakdown of the work done to create the amazing look achieved on Electros skin, A lovely insight to how layered effects and tweaks can build up an very cool effect, Electro was definitely my favourite looking character, some great effects along with one of my favourite scenes in the movie when his bolts were hitting the electric pylons and they were making a tune along with the soundtrack, very cool sound sync!

Extra face detail

Aswell as using projection to get my albedo layer, I wanted to work my own pours In just so I has some control on the level of pour detail. I knew that when using SSS in Arnold it was going to soften out my detail a little, this allowed me to prepare in advance and work the detail a little harder than normal, just to make sure when I come to generating the maps they would hopefully need little tweaking when setting up my character in Maya.

I used the mask a little when focusing on the lips, It helped alot to be able to freely stroke to give lip detail and not be worried about going over, The opposite was also effective, by inverting the mask I could focus on the pours and the mouth and not have them spill onto the lips.

Romain CHAULIAC - DEMOREEL 2013 // CG Generalist - Modeler

One of the big reels out there!! CHAULIAC's work is really great, I first saw his work reposted by CGBros, I Like to check up every now and again and see what work he is posting, which was currently a nice breakdown of a Hig res still he create with lots going on, Cyborg influenced of course (following the theme of many of the sci-fi reels I enjoy)



Here is his 2013 Reel, still some great work, go check out more!!

Unwrapping the head

After finishing the texture of the main characters face in Zbrush, I took it over to Maya to Unwrap, I used the new Unwrap tools that have come with Maya 2015 to give me a healthy initial unwrap, from there I began to smooth out and shift the points until I got a unwrap that I felt would be good for the 4K map projections. I then took the model back Into zbrush, and copied the new Uv's over to my Model inside of Zbrush to see how the detail responded to the UV's. I was very happy with the result, and decided to continue working a little extra detail into the model with the newly UV'd model knowing all the detail would be kept. 

Head development

The main character for my small collaboration project the lonely road is in full production at the moment, i'm currently finishing up texturing, I broke down the model into separate parts for skinning purposes and have enjoyed working on the model in four separate parts, The body, The hard surface mechanics, The helmet and the head. This is close to my final texture for the head. We tested the texture on the rig and after a few tweaks we are getting very nice results, definitely made us both that little more excited to see it coming together!

The Unknown Turnaround

The 2D turnaround for reference when I come to modelling my character in 3D, Worked a real large grown into the side of his body, and worked lots of colours of rot and infection into the flowery flesh, I took alot of influence from 'The Last of Us' I'm also liking the idea of using 'Marvelous Designer' to create the worn clothes, and add extra distress in Zbrush!

I like the concept, but plan on using this as basic reference when coming to my 3D model, I like working into the character alot when it comes to 3D, so may change it slightly, the growth does feel a little heavy, but i'l see how it looks when I come to it in Zbrush!

Texture Development - The Unknown

I began working colour into my developed shapes, and started to get interesting fungus/poison type colours mixed into the flesh and blood of an infected human, I then look at how distressed I wanted the character aswell as changing the colours of the clothing.

Sillhouettes - The Unknown

Some quick silhouette shapes of various monster's I sketched up, playing with limbs, growths and adaptions. I like sketching out sillhouettes as they sometimes give me a cool base to work from, and can begin working colour and texture into the shape aswell as still changing the shape very quickly and easily

Gathering Inspiration for a Personal project!

Gathering alot of influence from lots of different sites and Artists here, I think my biggest resource was ArtStation, absolutely brilliant site, A new clean cut way of showing off your work, an online portfolio which is gathering more and more publicity, Check it out!! 

I began of looking at a variety of influence to see which route of monster/alien i'd like to design, after a large collection of material I started getting drawn towards models and concepts that were more human like, but distorted, so a good underlying anatomy of human shape, but infected or an alien. What I like about this project is that its a slight spin off of 'The Lonely Road' Project, I wanted to think of a personal project that I could give a little more depth to the vague Lonely road story!

A 'Making of' overview of The Lonely Road's Pre-proudction

The Lonely Road from Josh Rogers 

Video Inspiration

Here is scene from 'Falling Skies'. This was one of my initial inspirations to create a project like this.

A Short that could show of my design through a dramatic and intense scenario.