Strife! WIP01

The one Darksiders character I really wanted to make while at Vigil but never got the chance to was Strife. I was really looking forward to the possibility of working on Darksiders III with him as the main character (or better yet, 4 player co-op!). Sadly, we never got to that point.

 I've been wanting to explore a few new techniques (mostly hard surface, rendering, surface materials, and hair) and thought why not do a Strife bust! This will be an ongoing project and I'll try to post my progress along the way.

Strife - Here is my reference sheet. The artists shown are:
Joe Mad - JoeMadFan.com
Paul Richards - Autodestruct.com
Ludo Lullabi - LudoLullabi.deviantart.com

I'm going to give my own spin to the character while staying true to his key features. I really liked the shorter nose piece and what I read as oculars on the crest of his helmet in the original piece that Joe drew. I'm also going to work green into him a bit more (mostly his collar). We had started linking key colors to the four horsemen while developing Darksiders II. War was Red, Death was Purple, Strife - Green, and I think we had Fury as Yellow.

Here is where I'm at with him (I will be doing his collar too). He's prepped and ready to go back into ZBrush:

And here is a progress shot of my steps:

• Blank - Quick basic mesh I could throw into ZBrush and get started on fleshing out the design
• DynaMesh - I spent about 20 minutes and roughed in the general shapes I wanted in Zbrush using DynaMesh. At this stage I'm not worried about being perfect at all. I just want to establish my shapes for retopo.
• Retopo - Once I've got my rough sculpt, I retopologize to create a mesh I can take into Max for refinement. Again, in this stage I focus more on speed than making anything perfect. My only real concern is maintaining my quads.
• Base Mesh - I've cleaned up my mesh and have prepped it for a final pass in Zbrush.

Well on to Sculpting!

Peppi's Elephant Cyclops - Final!

Finished! Huge thanks to Peter Boehme for letting me sculpt up this guy from his sketch book!

Peppi's Elephant Cyclops - Speed Sculpt

Peter Boehme recently posted these great tablet doodles (link) and I couldn't resist doing a speed sculpt of the Elephant Cyclops. Such a fun character!

I'm going to polypaint it next.

Stylized Head Study

I'm putting together a few pieces for my new website I'm working on. This was an experiment in mixing stylized shape language with a bit more realistic texture treatment.

Model Presentation: Mini-tutorial

I had a lot of people ask me about the presentation of this model. So I created this image (important areas are highlighted in orange) and answered some of the question below.

"What program is it from?" 
Print Screen from 3dsMax

"What shader did I use?" 
Standard Blinn Shader. 
• I set the shader to faceted so that the individual polygons are shaded.

• Set the Specular Level fairly high to make it shinny

• Make the Fall-off of the Glossiness tight

• Play with your Ambient, Diffuse, and Specular colors until you find something you like.

"How did you render your wireframe on top of your subdivided mesh?" 
For the subdivision*, I use Nurms subdivision within the Editable Poly modifier. By checking Isoline Display (checked by default), you will only see the wireframe for your control mesh (lowest subdivision). If you uncheck it, you will see a wireframe for your current subdivision (or Iterations). From there I don't actually render anything. I just take a Print Screen of my viewport.

* For the presentation, I like to put a single subdivision on my model to show why I chose the poly flow (edge loops) I did. The poly flow is created specifically for subdividing my mesh and for areas of detail. I'll have smaller tighter polygonal mesh detail in areas that I know will need tighter sculpted detail such as the face, joints, fingers and toes. For the rest of the character I try to maintain a consistent distribution of polys

Hope this is useful!

Goblin Horde!! - Base Blank

First project of 2013. This is the base blank for a group of Goblins I plan to build. My goal will be to create a horde of these guys through simple variations for my new portfolio I'm working on. I'll be moving into sculpting tomorrow.

Final Sculpt for my Racoucan

Finished up the sculpt for my Raccoon-Toucan amalgam. 

I have a digital painting I'm working on next. I should have a wip posted tomorrow.