Personally I feel more interest in designing such characters as I believe humans are “boring”. I have made the decision to focus my character design work on creatures, animals, and humanoid animals. Read on to find out my thoughts on this subject. Yes I know it’s obnoxious that I continue to paint these characters but whatever. I used spheres to gauge the lighting from all directions as well.īoth of these paintings were completed using digital maquettes for perspective, lighting, and material reference. Here is a sample of one of my render trials for a painting. The results are good, but rendering the maquette takes almost as long to do as it takes to paint the final picture. It’s the same as making a maquette (miniature posed sculpture) out of clay. I then use this as reference for painting. I use Blender Cycles to make a 3D render of the subject with lighting and materials. I experimented with a new painting process which involves using a “Digital Maquette”. I also redesigned my Sachtberg characters, as I am working on redoing an animated storyboard (animatic) for a potential short film. Let me catch you up (if you still follow me, that is).įirst and foremost, I changed my logo recently after feedback that it looked “straight out of the ’70s” and “I wonder if this business card is current or if it’s ancient and I should toss it”. I’ve been busy working on school stuff and while I have been posting things, I seem to have neglected this blog. I intend to model out an entire character to the same quality as the mask. I used Blender’s cycles rendering engine. With my finished mask, I roughly modeled up a hat and some clothes to pose for a final render, which you can see above. It helps create believable textures without spending as much time (good for studio productions under time constraints). dDo is a collection of filters and preset textures that you can apply procedurally to your model to give it dust, scratches, spots, and other dirtyness. Next, I took my extracted “maps” into a photoshop plugin called dDo (the legacy version is free, if you want it, scroll to the bottom of their page for the download). I used zBrush’s multimap exporter tools to “extract” the detail off the high resolution model to map it to the low resolution final model. I sent it back into zBrush and got the resolution high enough for me to sculpt in the little details like metal embossing, leather wrinkles, and stitching. I then took it to blender and cleaned up the resulting geometry because zBrush hardly ever makes geometry that is clean and neat for polygonal modeling techniques.Īfter cleaning it up, I UV unwrapped the model (UV unwrapping is the process of taking all the 3D “faces” and pointing them to a 2D “painting” for colors and textures). I loaded up zBrush and sculpted out the shape of the mask. I wanted to refresh my skills in porting texture from zBrush to Blender.įirst I collected some of my sketches and references, such as the ASMR (the phenomenon when you hear sounds that make your neck/head tingle) youtube channel Ephemeral Rift and his character “Dr. Of course, there’s much more work that could be done, but the focus of this project was the mask itself. To complete this project, I used blender, photoshop, zBrush, and dDo. I recently felt inspired to make a crow-mask plague doctor type character.