Skip to main content

WIP: Elegant Seahorse Part III

This week, I found I had a lot more free time to work on personal work, and despite some hardware setbacks that left me down and out for two days, I feel like I have made a considerable amount of progress. Unfortunately, I feel as if this progres is much more technical in nature so there won't be as many screen captures of my work. For this update, I jumped around the project significantly. In Z brush, I worked on further refining and creating scales. In Maya , I continued to use curves and deformers to build out the silhouettes of the fins. I also took the opportunity to tackle the "environment" surrounding my character. I am opting for a simple reef turntable. I replaced the plain pipe that the character was originally wrapping around , with a curling seaweed stem.
I used bright default Lamberts to help me get a feel for the flow and the shape of the remaining fins. Like the dorsal fins, I used curves to define the overall flow and lofted them.

I decided that I wanted to put my character in a more interesting environment that could double as a unique turntable. While currently still in the block-out phase, my hope is to continue to build this out so that I have a nice floating coral reef-like island for the seahorse to hold on to.
<< WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part II || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part IV >>

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Exploring Scales With Substance Designer

Preface Some of my first blog posts focused around how to create a "scale " material from texture to render in Maya with V-ray. The Series " Making A Seamless Scale Material " took a more "traditional" approach to creating a tile-able scale pattern. I think this method still has its strengths as it also covers valuable tips and tricks that can be used in Illustrator and Zbrush, but I wanted to share another method for creating scales by using a program dedicated to creating scale-able, flexible, and tillable procedural textures in a node based- lossless editing environment. I have been using Substance Designer almost exclusively for texture generation for the last year now and the amount of flexibility and possibilities that can be created are virtually endless. In truth, Substance Designer is no walk in the park for traditional texture artists. Its node based editing system and use of procedurals require you to think in a different way- but in the

Creating Spiny Fins With Curves and Surfaces ( Maya)

This "little" tutorial will go through the process of creating fins and fin shapes using curves and surfaces in Maya. I found this method to be the most "accurate"while building out the spiny shapes of fins in my current project, and thought I'd share my process. The tutorial below is broken down into three parts and will cover the basics of working with Curves in Maya. A. Building the Main Shape B. Creating the Spines C. Lofting Fin Shapes I will be diving into detail about certain tools in Maya. In this tutorial, I will go over using Live surfaces, converting edges to curves, lofting surfaces, converting nurbs to polygons, extrusions and moving constraints like snap to curve and snap to vertex. A. Building The Main Shape. Create a base curve . The base curve should match the center line of your mesh. This will define where the fin shape will start. If you have a mesh that is already topologized with a clean center line, extracting a curve f

Scales Generator Parameter Breakdown

I Recently finished my scales generator. This is a fairly flexible generator that allows you to do quite a lot of things. The generator is availalbe on substance share here : Scale Generator . Check out the parameter list below.