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

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.

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 ...

Making a Seamless Scale Material Part I

Today, I wanted to share my process for creating a seamless, scale-able material that can either be projected onto Zbrush models or applied as materials to UV'd models inside of programs like Maya and 3Ds Max. I used this when creating my unique stylized scale surfaces. You can find breakdowns for them here : Stylized Scale Materials This is a tutorial that will be split into four parts. Below is an outline on what we will cover. This post will be addressing part 1. Part 1: Approaching Scales and Creating a Pattern. Part 2: Refining your pattern in Zbrush. Part 3: Creating a compelling and believable scale Material inside of Maya I will be using the following programs to create my Scale material : Adobe Photoshop (optional) , Adobe Illustrator (optional), Zbrush , Vray and Maya. Part 1: Approaching and Creating A Pattern ...

Search This Blog