Fantasy Beast Creature

[ZippZopp]

i might take part in dominance war this time around. I took one of the warm up base meshes and started messing around with some ideas. I might take this guy further into a full character once i fully conceptualize the head sculpt. i've addressed more of the front of the face, the ear area and back of the head are really lacking right now...

http://zopfx.com/wips/dom_war_02.jpg

[TangentSpace]

cool sculpt dude, like the detail style

[Invi]

Awesome-o! Liking the sharp edges.

[Hulahuga]

The face looks very good indeed :). Try making bones on the body more natural ;).
GJ

[ZippZopp]

thanks guys. I did a little more work and liked where it was going so i decided to resurface the head and I'm going to do a full character body for this guy. i'm currently resurfacing, got some interesting ideas in mind that i'll need a solid base mesh for. i'll post some updates soon

[ZippZopp]

got an update here. finished most of the resurfacing of the head. currently modeling the mouth interior. the bottom large teeth will be able to bend outwards to open the mouth further. i'll try to post updates often to show some of my workflow

http://zopfx.com/wips/beast_01.jpg

[Hulahuga]

Those horns look good :).
Sure do

[Wayne]

It has a blizzard WOW type of design to it....although in a unique way. :)

Wayne...

[dessi]

Coming along nicely ;D

[ZippZopp]

this has morphed a bit into something kinda like the Balrog from lord of the rings. i kind of liked the idea of a creature that could be bipedal as well as quadrapedal. so this is where I am now. kind of a different workflow for me up to this point. I did the conceptual head sculpt and then resurfaced that. for the body, i used a super low res mesh, sculpted it a bit to get basic forms and then resurfaced that with topogun. still a lot to do before i get to the actual full on sculpt..

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_01.jpg

[Hulahuga]

The idea is good, but the wings seem detached.
I like the shoulders

[_S9_]

Great work ZippZopp. It's hard to criticize the design, it does remind me of Balrog from LOTR among others, the transition from the deltoids to the trapizius is a bit too thick IMHO, maybe bring out the sternocleidomastoid and throat, the hands look great, are those nostrils on his forehead? The transition from the wings to his back could use some work as well, overall you're off to a great start, looking forward to any updates.

[ZippZopp]

the neck region i haven't really addressed that much, i need to get the head attached into the body and then i'll be able to address that. i spent most of the day working on the wings so I'll have some updates soon. i had thought about getting rid of the horns and replacing them with some large bat like ears..what do you guys think? you are right about the wing transition into the back, i will work on that some more..updates coming soon. thanks for the feedback

[Hulahuga]

If you do the ears, you'd get a bit more of "your own" style to it. Cause now it's a balrog (kinda)

[ZippZopp]

yup, you're right...it had to be changed and I'm liking the large ears a lot more than the horns. I have to finalize the head / jaw and do the feet then I can sculpt it

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_03.jpg

[Wagner]

Yep, I agree. The version with ears works a lot better, even though I did not think the horned version reminds too much of Balrog. I think it looks more gargoyle kind of thing :)

Anyhow, it's very nice and promising, interesting to see it finished.

[Oscar]

i liked the horn version better...but that's just my opinion :)

[Hulahuga]

Looks good now :). A very hard mirror edge though

[ZippZopp]

finally wrapped up the base mesh and got a rig going so i did a couple of pose tests. they are pretty similar, just the variation of the right arm and hand

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_pose_01.jpg

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_pose_02.jpg

[tonytrout]

Bring back the horns they were kinda cool. The pose is pretty good but I think you could do some thing a little less symetrical with the batwings to give it a bit more dynamic. Good progress

[Oscar]

agreed with tonytrout. Imo U should move them to more vertical position to make him look like he just landed there:) and the horns were better :)

[Wayne]

It going to be another good one from Peter I think its safe to say ;) Very nice action pose as well by the way mate. ;)

Wayne...

[musashidan]

I think the top down detail of the wings is very well designed.Looks like the creature originally had 4 arms that are in the process of evolving into wings.nice job.Also,i'd have to say i prefer the bat ears over the horns.
good job with the rigging/skinning.

[Hulahuga]

This looks very good. Nice weight in the pose! Perhaps you could make a part of the wing a bit torn. For the asymmetry ;)

[ZippZopp]

thanks for the crits. i will be adding some asymmetry to the wings as well as changing the posing. i haven't addressed them much with the posing, I'm going to play around with that tonight. asymmetry will also be coming into the modeling as well. I like to model symmetrically through this phase for speed sake of modeling, rigging and skin weighting. once I get into a pose I like I'll begin modifying the mesh, wings especially, to break up the symmetry. i'll have some updates soon

thanks for looking

[Hulahuga]

Cool, we are waiting ;P

[xtrm3d]

really nice ,, looking forward to your rendering with some FX ..
spend quite some time on your webpage this afternoon .. you really dislay some kick ass stuff !! :-)

[Hulahuga]

Where the wings go to lower back it is quite freaky, look over it :P

[ZippZopp]

really nice ,, looking forward to your rendering with some FX ..
spend quite some time on your webpage this afternoon .. you really dislay some kick ass stuff !! :-)



Thanks :)

as for the wings into the lower back, that is just a deformation and skin weighting issue, that'll all be fixed once I get to sculpting. the skin weighting is just good enough to get a pose down, i end up fixing a lot of things in the sculpt...good eye though :)

[Hulahuga]

Thanks.

Okay, looking forward to it ;p.
Are you in on DWIV btw?

[ZippZopp]

nah, no dominance war for me. i thought about getting in on it, but just couldn't find the inspiration / motivation to do it

[Hulahuga]

Aha, aight. But you're quite good. You could even get a prize there!

[ZippZopp]

i finally got a few hours to get the pose finalized and the sculpting started. i'm just roughing the anatomy out right now, trying to make sure everything fits together. but here is where i am right now

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_sculpt_01.jpg

[xtrm3d]

really dig teh base ..
could see a full moon in teh background :-)

[Hulahuga]

Fingers needs a bit more proportion fixes. On the blocky part...

[ZippZopp]

i went a bit over the top on this i think...i usually don't push things this far and i may have overdone it, but here is what i've got goin. i may pull some areas back a bit so i don't lose some of the organic feel of the anatomy. still got a whole lot to do on it to wrap up the sculpt. what do you think...has it gone too far?

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_sculpt_04.jpg

[Bryan Silva]

No I think your doing just fine. I'm digging the level of detail. maybe you could just start deciding where the scale like skin stops and more fleshy forms start. Then you could do a nice stretched skin type of treatment where the skin transitions. I don't know. Just thinking out loud. Definitely loving the way this is coming along. Got me all inspired to start a nice creature. Why cant there be more hours in a day!

[Wayne]

Yeah if you nail those transitional areas in this, then it'll make this piece pop. I'd like to see some more skin tension in the shouolder and wings area as well. Nothing overdone about it yet mate...you've got a good balance going.


Wayne...

[ZippZopp]

the transitional areas are the toughest..whether it is transitioning the flow of the scales or going from scales to something more fleshy. i think i might tone back some of the large scales on the back of his neck, maybe make it a little less uniform and potentially make the spikes a bit larger.

thanks for the feedback

[RobinB]

Looking great.

Can I ask how you went about doing the alligator-type scales around the neck? Are they all just hand sculpted individually or done with stamps? I was doing some doodling a while back and couldn't really up with a decent approach to that sort of thing. Stencils and stamps didn't really line up properly. I think I ended up using individual Imprints for a lot of them but was never really happy with the approach. I thought it would take too long doing them all individually, but maybe that's the best approach.

[ZippZopp]

it is very time consuming, but i did it all by hand. stamps just don't really work that well for that type of thing. i may try making some stamps and alphas for some of the smoother under belly area, but for the larger spikes i found I had to just do it by hand for control and proper flow...

[Wayne]

One way would be to use a very basic stencil with the shape of the base of each scale only and use this to paint a mask which you can then invert. That should make things a bit easier whe it comes to sculpting the major scales etc... That would be the way I'd aproach it anyway. Although totally by hand you get a nice bit of irregularity as well.

Wayne...

[RobinB]

Thanks guys. I think I came to the conclusion that it must be hand done.

I guess there's a trade off between the time taken and the fidelity of the scales. I'm working on an octopus model at the moment and that's got sort of small scales/ lumps on. I used a stencil for most of those and just ignored the fact that some were going to overlap at the edges. It worked OK for that since it's quite irregular, but it wouldn't be any good if the scales actually had to line up like yours.

I haven't tried using stencils with freeze, that sounds useful.

One thing that might help is if there's a way to import a map as a mask, then you could paint out the layout of the scales on a UV image in Photoshop using whatever tools you like so they follow the geometry, import that as a mask to freeze the edges of the scales and then sculpt or flood the layer as a starting point. But you can't import masks can you? I guess it can be done the other way around and use a map to displace the scales. Not too easy to predict how it'd come out though.

[ZippZopp]

little update here. i needed some more geometry along the back and tail so i added some geometry in maya for the larger spikes along the back.

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_sculpt_05.jpg

[Hulahuga]

The wing detail is great man!
The rocky back area seems a bit soft, to blobby, you know.

[ZippZopp]

first texture and render test....trying to figure out what i want to do with it. no spec map yet, color is preliminary, bump map is barely worked on, just trying to get the ball rolling here

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_render_02.jpg

[Hulahuga]

Looks very real on some parts! :). Especially on the chest.
What render app and how have you made the light setup?

[ZippZopp]

it is mental ray in maya that I'm using to render. right now it is an hdri with final gather and one area light with quadratic falloff and a blackbody mental ray light hooked into it.

i also degamma my textures by setting the framebuffer to .455 and I render a 32 bit exr file. I use the mia_exposure_simple node connected to my render camera with the gamma set to 2.2.

[Hulahuga]

I gotta learn how to do that.
Shader?

[Wayne]

Nice one Peter..I was hoping you'd discover the joys of blackbody shader ;) The model is looking nice and should make a great print. ;)

Wayne...

[ZippZopp]

shader is misss fast skin...but the sss is toned down quite a bit, i only wanted a slight hint of it in there.

[Hulahuga]

Thanks man.

[mahi3d]

awesome work
really the pose rocks, inspiring work
i want see this model with good background scene
just like your before model "Orc"

[Bryan Silva]

Glad to see your still making progress on this guy. Hes coming along nicely. I think the best camera angle Ive seen you post was the top shot on this image: http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_sculpt_04.jpg

[Darkghosty]

Wow it's been a while since i've checked in on this thread, coming along very well. I agree with Bryan that camera angle just felt powerful to me, keep up the good work

[ragnakim]

WOW! Just WOW! :|

[ZippZopp]

been able to work on this here and there. getting close to finishing up the maps for this guy. trying to figure out what i'm going to do for a background and all that...

http://zopfx.com/wips/demon_render_05.jpg

[Hulahuga]

A lot of parts seem really believable!
You could try moving the camera a bit closer. and make the head face the camera.

[Wayne]

Nice work peter, I'm glad you finished this one. it'd be great to see it with a full color grading at some point. Excellent job as usual. :)

Wayne...