Hey! Let me use the opportunity to say THANK YOU for all the comments and critics I received on every thread I made on my website! I know it’s sometimes difficult finding the time to write a few lines. There is so much amazing stuff around and you can’t post everywhere. I value every feedback! Thank you!
In December I had the honor to create a few models for the amazing Lee Perry Smith (http://infinite.cgsociety.org/gallery/) He gave me his basemesh and reference pictures and I did some sculptures and passed them on to Lee again for further shading, lighting, texturing and rendering. He is a true genius when it comes down to let this stuff look real. So, don’t forget to visit his portfolio. I’m sure you will be amazed by what is possible today! Soon these models will be released through his site for purchase and study. So stay tuned! I completed this project with some personal “clothes studies” as you can see above. I’m not that happy on how the rendering turned out but I had not enough time for further tweaking. Additionally we have tons of snows here and I prefer going snowboarding than sitting in front of my workstation 🙂 As always, I did the rendering in 3ds max with VRay. I have placed some directional spotlights to enhance the shadows and achieve some nice rim light. No HDRI was used this time. For the material I have interlaced some falloff maps together with a VRay dirt map. The overall look maybe would be somewhat better if I would change the main color, but the folds and wrinkles turned out quite nicely. I have worked only on the character itself with normal and displacement maps. The clothes parts are full resolution exports from ZBrush.

Shari

It was great fun to do the clothes. I tried some new techniques and made a few new brushes. If you should be interested in the process, feel free the check out the short breakdown in the article section. I made the brushes and one part of the robe also available for download. The sculpting process was quite straightforward. First I made some large scale changes on a very low subdivision level and then I stepped up immediately to the highest subdivision and worked there on all the details.

Inspiration

I love the Christmas time. The year is coming to an end, the whole stress is almost over and what can be better than some white powder snow and you with your board on top of a mountain… We have some Christmas rites that we are practicing every year. Without them, it’s not Christmas 🙂 One part of the preparation is not only the Christmas tree but also the nativity scene. When I was a child, I was building it together with my father one day before Christmas Eve. Now I’m older and doing it alone 🙂 I was always fascinated by the small painted figures. I can remember unpacking the stuff sometimes already in summer because I couldn’t wait until Xmas to see them again… They are old but not precious. (Maybe they would, if they were made out of wood) Actually most of them are looking pretty sleazy. Nevertheless I could look at them for hours and was captivated by the clothes. I have even tried to rebuild bigger versions of them out of wax and wood but have always failed. Today I’m able to do that digitally. Maybe I should make one for next Xmas, print it out and place it in the scene? I’ll see…

More models

The following screenshots show a few other models I made for Lee Perry Smith. You will find a textured and rendered version of the first one, “Dimension J” in his portfolio (http://infinite.cgsociety.org/gallery/702969/) I made the hands and feet only for the first sculpt. For all other versions I have changed only the head and truncus and made some scale adjustments on the extremities. The hair is nothing more than a placeholder. Lee will replace it with “real hair” later on. I have noticed that the style of the hair is very important for rebuilding a characters face. If it has to look similar to the reference images, the hairline can give you some great landmarks for the rest of the head. For me it is much more complicated to recreate the likeness of a face without the hair…

Interesting Links

Once again, here is a link list of some websites and stuff. Some of them helped me through the last project; some are just useful on everyday’s work.

http://tomaskral.cz/ great artist, great portfolio, great website
http://www.pointpusher.com/ beautiful work! don’t forget to check Daniel’s blog
http://www.artrenewal.org/ most of you will already know this site. VERY important!!
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/ visit the “sketchbook” forum. It’s exploding for all the creativity…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7FQzZqPAnQ&NR=1 keeps me motivated 🙂

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