I finally found enough free-time to pick up this project again! For this part, I focused only on environment assets. I decided the base that the seahorse and coral sit on was a little boring so I worked on pulling it ouut and adding a bit of character to it. I also began to work on the coral and bring ot some detail in them. So far, I have only sculpted three corals. I wanted to define three unique tube styles that I could use to populate the the rest of the tube corals around the seahorse. Here is the base, and environment without the seahorse. Here are three of the corals that I worked on in this part.

I think I have come close to finishing the details on the seahorse (yay! ) and now all I have left to do is the environment assets. I have already begun Uving Coral parts for texturing. Once I have finished UVing this little project, I plan on using exclusively Substance Painter 2 to generate my textures! I am really looking forward to getting to play with some textures and shaders! || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part VII

This week , I finished building out the fin shapes for the Seahorse, and I have begun blocking out "spines" along his jaw to give him more a a "rose with thorns" feel. I felt like the shape of the fins made him appear just a little too soft and figured he'd need a few defense mechanisms to ward off predators . While his fins are much larger than your average seahorse, the the general shape of his body and overall lack of a tail fin would still result in a pretty slow movement. I plan on adding spines along his snout and tail in my next update. I hope it will make him look just a tad bit more menacing! || WIP : Elegant Seahorse Part VI

This time around, I have continued to improve and block out the turntable for the seahorse. I Developed a slightly less tedious way to do the fins. It requires a few more steps but, in the end , it yields better results that require less tweaking. Looking closely at the model, it is apparent that the fins o the left side of the body look a little different than the right side of the body. This is because I used a different method for the right side, so the fins look cleaner and more precise. On the left side, there is a bit of warping and pinching, but I think that can easily be fixed inside of ZBrush, or I can go back and apply my new method for generating fins from the spines. I didn't realize actually how hard it can be just to figure out what types of corals there are and how to compose them in nicely on the turntable. I have made a few 'alien' corals based off of real-world corals like tube coral, brain coral and pink coral. I hope that by the next pass, I will ...

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 th...

I learned that fins are a lot of work. Sculpting scales, no problem. Making fins? ehhhhh. In this update, I changed the face a bit and continued blocking out the scales on the body . I decided that I really didn't like the fins on the seahorse from week one , so I decided that I wanted to begin to play around with shapes and ideas that I'd be happier with. Since this guys isn't really grounded in reality, I took a lot of liberties with how big the fins were and how they were shaped. In the end, I decided to go with a spiny dorsal look , like a bass but much longer in comparison to the body like a lion fish. I played around with shape and flow as well, drawing influence from beta fish. I think this gave me some really nice, elongated and smooth shapes to play with. Working on Fins To create the fins, I exported my seahorse into Maya and decided to get an overall feel for flow and shape with the dorsal fins. To do this, I used the Curve tool to give me...

As promise to myself, I have decided to begin publishing my Work-in-progress pieces on my blog . I hope that by doing this, I can push my self to continue developing my portfolio outside of work and to also get some useful critique and pointers from others. I spent about 7 hours this week, upgrading my elegant seahorse concept. Before I began working on it, the creature looked like this : After 7 hours, I was able to base-block the scales on the upper body and play with mid-range details. After a lot of messing around, I decided that hand-sculpting in the scales would be the best route for this project. Since the seahorse is already posed and asymmetrical, I felt as if hand sculpting vs, using alphas wouldn't be that much of a difference, since I could't lay out alphas on the symmetry line and since the scales needed to flow with the form. My hope is that by next week, I will have most of the mid level details done on the seahorse body so that I c...

This tutorial goes over how you can connect your new tile-able texture into a vray mtl and play with the settings to create a material that acts like fish scales.  1.) Setting up your Material.  Scales are more complex than we think. They have a level of iridescence , subsurface scattering and micro- specular detail to them that is hard for our eyes to see. These three attributes make all the difference when trying to pull off an interesting and believable scale material. Lets call them cornerstone attributes.  Exploring cornerstone attributes of scales:  This section will go over the definitions of the cornerstone attributes of fish scales. It will brush a little on the biology of fish and how we can use this information when building our material, Feel free to skip this section if biology isn't you thing. :)  Iridescence :  Iridescence basically occurs when the hue shifts with the angle of observation (...

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 ...

In part I of this tutorial, I went over my process for creating a tile- able texture mask using photoshop and illustrator. We ended with how different applied effects done in photoshop could alter the basic outcome a sculpted tile inside of Zbrush. In this lesson, I want to go over how to apply that texture in Zbrush and then further refine it using Zbrush's robust sculpting tools and a combination of masking techniques. While I will personally be working with a mask that I did indeed create in photoshop, this process can be easily applied and used without having a mask at all.  We will go over some helpful tips and hints that can help us keep our texture seamless and furthermore, expedite the sculpting process so that we can get great results with less effort.  For this tutorial, you will need the following programs : Zbrush. If you created a seamless pattern from the first part of this document, then be sure to have that file as well!  Setting up y...