I was watching dinosaur documentaries this afternoon while working on some storyboards and couldn’t help but get caught up in it all. I love the idea of dinosaurs having feathers. It’s absolutely fascinating. Couldn’t help myself and had to set the boards aside and take a painting break.
So here is my take on a T-rex with feathers. For the record I painted her using ArtRage Studio Pro.
Just added my iNaturalist feed to the site.
A few recent watercolor doodles pulled from my sketchbook.
Here is the final render of my ZBrush Self Portrait sculpt. I created the sculpt entirely in ZBrush primarily using Dynamesh and Fibermesh techniques.
While making the model I stumbled upon the ZBrush retopology tools and spent a few nights learning how to implement them on my goofy mug. The retopolgy tools are a little clumsy but I found with time and effort that they were able to get the job done. Fibermesh can be a real memory drain so this new resource is a godsend for my little laptop. Now that I have a retopology option I am able to subdivide my models in a much more efficient way and increase the resolution I am able to work at significantly. I feel like a fool for not figuring out this function earlier.
I love dynamesh, don’t get me wrong, but it can be difficult to work with on the back-end, especially after you have found your character. The high polycounts cause lots of memory crashes which up your chances of lost work and make computational heavy actions like transposes nearly impossible. But the real killer and the reason I began researching retopology options is the lack of UV’s . You create these beautiful characters but can’t do anything with them outside of ZBrush. The lack of UVs was a big problem for me on some of my previous sculpts especially when I was trying to render glass. At the time I wanted to render in MentalRay but couldn’t get any of my color information over to maya. Now I can do this easily so I couldn’t be happier.
My other big experiment this time around was using a morph target to sculpt the hair. My previous Fibermesh hair attempts all involved raw extrusions which I would sculpt using the move elastic brush to the desired styling. This time though I sculpted a guide model, ie morph target, and grew the hair to fill in the difference. This worked rather brilliantly and i’m pleased with the results. The one small catch is that my final hair has some unknown error which has block all attempts at exporting and transposing. I will have to rebuild it at some future date if I ever want to animate this fellow.
For those who are interested into this sort of thing. Here is the topology and a few hi-res renders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkXioL_Gk5k&hd=1
Super fantastic art update! Looks like my King sculpture has been added to Pixologic’s ZBrush turnable gallery.
I’m working on ZBrush self-Portrait at the moment. Nothing official just killing time while i’m up late watching the babies.
I just finished sculpting in the hair and thought I would share my render. I’m trying a different fibermesh technique this time for sculpting hair. I would like to get away from a real hair look so this time I’m using it to create large chunky sections that I dynamesh and add detail too. I’m going to build up a “hand painted” texture and see if I can get a nice 2.5d look going. Just playing around so no promises on where this will go.
Maybe I can use this thing to make some silly gif animations or something. That might be fun for the site.
Here is a complete posting of my latest water color sketchbook.
Random Monkey fridge drawing.
From now on It’s going to be a lot easier to paint my iPad painting commissions. My amazing wife just surprised me with a brand new iPad. It still has that fresh out of the box smell. :) Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with those white apple stickers.
More Train Drawings. In this little series Jesse James and his brother do their thing as they rob the Glendale Train. The little fellow in the upper left corner is my eldest son Silas.
The scan’s a little hard to read. The Engineer gasps, The James Borhters!! Hot Dog!! Why, You boys are famous! Can I get an autograph?!!