Xiahou Ba Clothing

After a bunch of ideas of how I should dress Xiahou Ba for this project, I finally decided to do a 'retro' style 1990's take on his clothing as an odd outfit for him. This is a very rough scribble-over ZBrush render to get an idea of how his cloths will work together in the end. So far I am about 90% of the way through modelling his shorts, with only a few more details to add to them such as his belt buckle, back pockets, and possible some more seams. At this point I should also point out that the colours on the concept are very much not final.

Once I have completed the initial base-mesh of his trousers I also need to correct some of their shaping, then move onto his shoes, necklace, wrist accessories, and hat. His shirt should be fine to all be done in ZBrush, with possibly manual retopology if it requires.

Caleb Landry Jones

Decided to do another 2D piece while working on my Xiahou Ba, so chose Caleb Landry Jones as a subject. I was listening to the 'Game of Thrones Season 4 Soundtrack', and a lot of the 'You Are No Son Of Mine' song in particular at the time, hence wanting to do something a bit more dark looking. I tried to get the tones and colours right all over the image but I'm still not 100% happy with it, although drawing attention to the eyes (particularly the left eye; our left) worked out well in the end I think. Created in Photoshop CC using my Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet as always.

The piece was originally done at 2000 x 1600. It reduced well but the noise added to the original looks a bit weird up-close I think....

Xiahou Ba - Initial Retopology for Base-Mesh

I've finished the initial retopology stage to be used as the new base-mesh in ZBrush. This mesh will have all of the current detail projected onto it, and I will then progress from there instead of the Dynamesh mesh that I currently have in ZBrush. This process should make the model much more efficient and easier to work with in the future.

I have tried to keep this mesh as clean as possible, using only quads for better deformation, and trying not to alter the edge-flow too much as this often causes tight angles to appear on the sculpture surface at higher resolutions. This mesh is not build for 'in-game use'; it is only to be used as a base-mesh. The final mesh topology will be built once the character is fully sculpted from this model, and that will be the mesh that takes into account animation deformation and required resolution changes for each area of the body.

This was all done in Maya 2015 using its vastly improved 'Modelling-Toolkit' tools. The resulting mesh is 6876 triangles, marked down from the original decimated mesh of 169,176 triangles, and that came from a mesh of around 1 million triangles.

Xiahou Ba Turntable Progress

I finally got 'Xiahou Ba' to grow hands and feet, and refined him a bit more, although still reasonably far from the point of his initial retopologisation and such. I decided to use this new skin material from a tutorial I followed, although it wasn't until the end that I realised it won't look all that great until the model is at least textured too, so I fell down on that part. However, when used on a base colour it isn't so bad.

Here is the progress. Note that the .GIF below is something like 8MB so it could take a few seconds to show or play properly. 

The .mov was actually smaller in file-size, better quality, and original scale, so I'm still questioning myself as to why I made a .GIF out of it.... but oh well. Oh and also Noise in specularity is the best thing since sliced bread! :D

Yes, yes I've seen the bald patch too now that I've exported him.... The hair model is actually a mesh from his PS3 model, so not sure what has happened there; most likely I somehow missed that part of the mesh when selecting it to bring into ZBrush, and hadn't noticed till now. -.-

Xiahou Ba Progress

Development with this project have been slow with the extra 2D work I've been doing lately, along with customizing my new Filofax book, but its still ongoing at least. Here is the progress so far. The next stage is to build him hands and feet (probably separately from this sculpture first, then Frankensteined on later). Once I have him to that stage where he has all of the parts of his body he needs, I can refine him over and over again until I'm happy, then retopologise him, and pose him, then possibly sculpt the pose again to fix any issues and make it more natural. I may also retopologise him roughly as soon as his full body is created before refinement, simply to not rely on ZRemesher, and make the mesh work the way I want it to.

Rudimentary skin shader :)

Devon Bostick Artwork

Started watching 'The 100' the other day, and decided I wanted to draw Devon Bostick, who plays 'Jasper' in it. So using the same art style I've been using these past few months, here it is.

And here is his break-down into six stages of development for anyone interested. All drawn directly to the computer using Photoshop CC and an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet.

'Daryl Hannah' Artwork

This is my most recent 2D artwork. It is of 'Daryl Hannah' playing her part of 'Ellie Driver' from Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill' movies. This piece began as a portrait that developed into a full-body piece. Because of this, the final image is actually quite large. This gave me the opportunity to try and add some more detail which was nice, although I didn't want to overdo it.

While creating this piece I also decided to save every so often, creating an 8-stage collage of the process to give you a better idea of what I was doing. As usual, Photoshop CS6, Intuos 4 Wacom tablet, drawn directly to the computer after an initial sketch in my sketchbook.

This is the 8-stage break-down of the artworks creation. All in all it was created over three or four days after work, coming back to it, leaving it, and coming back to it many times. I'm still not 100% happy with it, and there are still areas like her hair that I most likely will lush-up a bit more before I say it really is done for portfolio use of whatever.

Although its not very easy to see the changes, there were several areas on the piece that I changed only in the painting stages that the original base sketch had wrong.

The original image is 3000 pixels tall and 2400 pixels wide, although it certainly did not start out that big. Initially it would have been something like 600x800.

This is a recolour of the artwork I did to see if it looked better, but in the end I decided the warmer colours suited it better. However the colder version does have a more clinical, cold hearted feel to it, that would have been much more suiting to the actual event that this artwork was created from in the film. Silent assassin.

A handy technique that I already knew was out there, but have only recently really found useful as part of mixing my colours was to reverse engineer the colours and tones, building up from darks to lights, instead of the other way around. I employ both methods now, partly depending on the material that I'm painting, and just as and when needed. For example her jacket was mostly painted from a mid tone base, adding shadows and highlights, but then started rebuilding the tones and colours over it again but not at 100% opacity. The results often make the surface seem much thicker and richer, and worked out to be a far superior way to incorporate light sub-surface scattering effects instead of just trying to paint it over or directly under shadow layers. <3

New 2D Artworks

These are two more pieces that I created recently. The first is of a friend, the second is of Lucy Liu, although I'm not as happy with that one: I spent far less time than usual on it, and eventually gave up trying to liquefy  filter her face to the seventh circle of hell....

Both drawn directly to the computer in Photoshop CS6 using an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet.

On the upside, I have started to get a better workflow going for mixing the colours with more ease. I've also been going back to some basics of colour theory and techniques to draw attention by not unnecessarily adding details where they are not needed. The advantage of this means that parts of the artworks that might have taken ages to produce properly can be overlooked, while focusing more attention on areas of interest. The downside is the opposite side of the first point; some areas that I think would look nice fully rendered are overlooked to help the artwork as a whole.

This piece had far less time taken on it than the other images. In fact it was done in one sitting in a few hours at night. Something that I have learned not long ago was that I should take breaks during my work to refresh my perspective on what I'm looking at when I come back to it, even if these breaks are only for 10 minuets. Previously I often tried to get things done all in one go simply because I was enjoying it so much and just wanted to see the final product, but I miss a lot when doing this.

Her right shoulder looks off although her base suggested it was technically right. I think maybe her arm itself is to blame more than the angle of the shoulder, but either way it bugs me. To fix it properly I should have taken the time to do the pose in front of a mirror to get a better 3-dimensional understanding of what was going on. Her eyes are both right as far as I could test from the reference, but they look strange together for some reason; if I blank out one half of her face, she looks right to me. I guess the biggest reason for this image not looking so right is that I lack the understanding of why it looks wrong. Therefore I find it hard to correct. More time was surely needed to address these issues appropriately.

Project 'Marcus White' - Closed

Hello world! Long time no speak!

I will be updating this blog on a regular occurrence again now, but before I do I just want to point out (in case it was not obvious already) that project 'Marcus White' is now officially closed. I have decided to stop working on him because it has been so long since I last did that looking at his model now, I can see so many problems and mistakes on him. I know I can do a lot better now, so plan to start (and finish) a new 3D project in the near future. For now I have been building up to doing this by practicing my 2D skills again on digital canvases.

Before this project is hidden deep on my computer, I decided to take it into Maya 2015 and do some real-time renders of it using Maya Hardware 2.0 to show off what I was working with before I stopped.

(The final state of the retopology process to the right)

On a note there, since Maya 2014 and especially now in 2015, the new tools for retopology in Maya are damn awesome! I use them more and more often at work now to help in the process of creating very complex, but accurate high resolution meshes. They work wonderfully!

Above is a real-time skin shader (no textures so the colour still looks very flat unfortunately, though it does have a *cough FAKE cough* sub-surface scattering effect on it which works nicely. He also is lightly reflecting a high resolution HDR image that was has been blurred in hardware too.