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...