Sanc's sketchbook

[Sanctuary]

NOTE : some people outside of europe and america seems to be unable to see pictures hosted to imageshack, so i provided a imgur link to the same picture but hosted on imgur

Some time ago for fun i sculpted a non realistic body in Sculptris.
Originally, i intended to retopo it in Blender like i did for some other Sculptris pieces but during the process i changed my mind and modified the face to fit a new project : an hommage to one of my favorite penciller and one of the most creative writer that built many of the story i enjoyed in comic books during my youth, Jack Kirby.
I was going to try to build a rendition of one of the character he invented from his Fourth world saga : Darkseid.

wiki entry for this Darkseid character :

Darkseid

According to writer Mark Evanier, Jack Kirby modeled Darkseid physically on actor Jack Palance, while “the style and substance of this master antagonist were based on just about every power-mad tyrant Kirby had ever met or observed, with a special emphasis on Richard Milhous Nixon.”

While the face was ready from Sculptris work, in Blender i built the helmet, starting from a retopo that was following the head, then using the 2.49b Solidify Selection script from the Edit Mode (that is similar to the 2.5x modifier of the same name) to give it depth.
And adjusting the vertice to get the final shape.

http://i.imgur.com/QgghA.jpg

More rework later and i was beginning to be happy with it.

http://i.imgur.com/ujDmP.jpg

With a bit of subsurf and edge split, the appearance was more interesting visually

http://i.imgur.com/lwkay.jpg

So it was it, i used a tiled rock texture i found on some free texture website (sorry i don’t remember which one) :

http://i.imgur.com/D9G4N.jpg

And using this very nice GIMP free plugin i generated a normal map for it, would be very good to simulate the rock aspect of the creature skin :

http://i.imgur.com/fO5h7.jpg

Playing with the lights and having the eyes set to Emit , the feel was going in the good direction for the character.
To make the scene a bit less empty, i took one of the wallpapers i collected long time ago and looked like some evil city (fitting for the character) and mapped it to a plane i placed behind the character.
Toned down a bit the normal map too, and here it was :

http://i.imgur.com/W3Bhz.jpg

I decided to toy a bit with the eyes, adding some light sources in there and making the eye material as “halo” to give some kind of “life” in them.

http://i.imgur.com/nreAN.jpg

Though i think the eye activity lowers a bit the character dread presence on the scene, it seems to contribute in making it more active.
But it was great fun for me to build this little hommage to Jack Kirby.

Sculptris + Blender is an amazing combo to let you express your creativty.

Some of my sculptris/blender random doodles made for fun can be found in this thread from the old sculptris forum.

[hackedmind]

That looks pretty good to me

three starz0rz

[Sanctuary]

Didn’t noticed someone replied, so sorry for being that late, but thank you.

During the BlenderArtist downtimes, i decided to try to create a cartoonish ogre model and use it to have fun training and learning more about some Blender functions like the retopo and the various UV features.

Using the Blender metaballs i built something approaching the shape i was aiming for (i had to cut the thing in the half and apply a mirror to get both side under a symetry)

Then exported it into Sculptris and began to sculpt that basis

sculpting further :

I was not satisfied by the proportions, in my idea i wanted to go for toon-like ones, but in the end the deformed look was far from good enough for me, so i modified it more :

It was more like it, but not yet good for me.

Better, but the face needed some more work

It was it. Now exporting back into Blender for retopology

I’m far from expert as you can see, but it’s working good enough for me

Baking a normal map from the high poly sculpt on the low poly retopo was working very good (left high poly, right low poly) :

I used then a Ambient Ocllusion baking from the high poly on the low poly as the texture basis, that i worked on GIMP to obtain :

Experimenting with some light source , i noticed that baking the “full render” was actually able to give a very good texture :

Finally, i decided to try appending it to Blender 2.56a so i could give a test to the Rigify feature with it :

Not finished, as i need to get the eyes and mouth modelled one day (would be the occasion to try for the 1st time to rig a face) but it worked much better than i thought.

[Sanctuary]

Using the excellent script “Mocap Madness” from batFINGER (for my needs i used the script that is in his tennis.blend)
(need a recent Blender build, like this one that i used for it) , i tried to apply the ballerina mocap animation from one of the batFINGER files to my Ogre.

To cut on rendering time a lot, and as it was just for testing, i didn"t used the antialias feature, and only a very basic ambient occlusion.

Here’s the short animation on vimeo :

added a reworked base head model for multires testing

Attachments

headmultir2.blend (119 KB)

[Benny_Flex]

@Robsoie"

And using this very nice GIMP free plugin i generated a normal map for it, would be very good to simulate the rock aspect of the creature skin :

For a rock aspect you could add crackles and “silex” texture. Here it looks like there is a generical “noise” instead of rock.

what i mean by silex:

what i meanby crackles:

Oherwise, I like the style of the face.

[marcolorenz]

Nice!
It reminds me of Andre de giant

[Sanctuary]

@marcolorenz
thank you.
Andre the Giant will always stay in my mind, i have fond memories of him.

@Benny_Flex
Good point about the normal, thanks.
The texture i used that was rather bad to start with, and it was what i used to generate that normal map, it may explain why it looks like noise.

So i went back to it and this time i used a free rocky texture from here :
http://www.loopix-project.com/view_tex_pack1/index.htm

That was of a much better quality, and generated too a new normal for it in Gimp, i think it looks much better in the end :

[3dementia]

Missed this thread, last texture is a big improvement, still clipping to much to black for my taste on the face, but I like the dramatic lighting. Your ogre character is impressive as well. The hood desperately needs some texture as well, try an oren nayer shader.

[Sanctuary]

Thank you, i reworked the helmet a bit and set the whole scene a bit less dark

[GraphiX]

Nice. Looks very sith like. Not sure what blue thing is though.

[Sanctuary]

“blue thing” is part of the original DC character design, its shape change slightly for each artists tasked to pencil the character, but overall it’s clothing and a helmet.

added to this post a simple base model for a monster character

added a test blend for dyntopo base

Attachments

basecreature.blend (99.4 KB)testdyn.blend (80.8 KB)

[yoff]

The “blue thing” needs more realistic lighting. If the face is so dark underneath the eyes and nose, there can be very little light coming from the viewing direction. Yet the “blue thing” has forceful highlights facing the camera.
This makes it les integrated into the picture and is probably the reason people have trouble seeing what it is…

[Benny_Flex]

Very good work on textures!

I agree with @yoff.

The overall is too dark, altrought i understand you want to build a dark mood…

@Robsoie thank you for the textures link.

[Sanctuary]

Thanks for the constructive feedback.
I tried another render of this scene (click for original size) :

The darkness of the scene is needed considering the character “background story”, it would make no real sense for such a character to be in an obvious lighting, as Darkseid defining trait is to be orchestrating whatever evil plots from the shadows.
But maybe there’s a difference in gamma between our monitors, because it does not seem that dark on mine, the darkness on mine is only on less than a half of the character surface, as intended.

I removed every additional light sources and kept only 1 for the whole scene to prevent the helmet and clothing to get their own light exposing, so they’re now affected by the same exposition as the character itself.
I added some very small light near the eyes to test how it would render, not very satisfied with this though.

The helmet and clothing are affected by some noise to get it less plastic.

EDIT :
added a head model with a simple unwrap for baking test

Attachments

headmultir3.blend (131 KB)

[Benny_Flex]

Nice improvement around the eyes.You could add a red glow effect as post process.

Yes that’s maybe a gama issue.

[Sanctuary]

I’m not very used to nodes, but i tried and i can’t get the glow to work according to the topology around the glowing effect, if i use a Mix node with a simple glow system :

I end with the glow ignoring the topology and going then through the part of the model it is not supposed to go through :

If instead of a Mix Node, i use a Z Combine Node like this :

The glow does not go through the topology, but that’s because there’s just no more glow (and the eye for some reason is no more of the red it should be, but is a lighter red) :

So i’m rather puzzled at how obtaining a glow like this (quick GIMP hackjob, i can’t yet find a way to obtain this in Blender with nodes) that will not go through the part of the topology that is supposed to occlude it.

[Sanctuary]

More for testing and having fun with it, i decided to give a try to the very impressive Nicholas Bishop skin modifier (some nice people made some builds with his patch on graphicall)

In only a couple of minute i could obtain a base shape that would have took me much longer as i’m not really the fastest modeller around :

Unfortunately, there are few bugs with unconnected faces and non manifold vertices/edges, as it’s a very early alpha of the Skin Modifier, those were to be expected.
But nothing to serious that a few more minutes can’t repair.
After fixing those, it can then be imported into Sculptris with no problem.

and a dozen of minutes toying with that Blender-made base shape in Sculptris :

http://imgur.com/Fav1J

Fun to notice how it is quicker to work from a base shape than to work from he default sphere. Maybe i’ll keep working on this dino in the future.

Blender-Scultpris is an awesome combo, and Mr Bishop skin modifier is definitively not just some random feature, but an extremely usefull new tool for sculptors to quickly sketch a base mesh for working on it later.
I hope he will keep up at it, the potential and usefullness is very good.

[Sanctuary]

Had some fun with some sculptris painting, GIMP normal map plugin use and Blender rendering :

And all of this started from the usefull and amazing Skin modifier from Nicholas Bishop, it made the base shape for this sculpture piece so easy and quick.

Lost some of the details of the sculpture, because i halved the polycount of it before texture painting (as i wanted to avoid some potential crash on Sculptris), as it was just some fun test, that’s not much of a problem.

edit : added addon contrib folder for Blender stable 2.66a release

Attachments

266aaddons_contrib.zip (1.17 MB)

[Sanctuary]

Gave another attempt to the Darkseid character, trying to create a glow effect around the eyes, and changing the point of view to get this effect displaying nicer :

The node compositing i used for this, i’m not very used to nodes though :

[Alekzsander]

@Robsoie

More for testing and having fun with it, i decided to give a try to the very impressive Nicholas Bishop skin modifier (some nice people made some builds with his patch on graphicall)

In only a couple of minute i could obtain a base shape that would have took me much longer as i’m not really the fastest modeller around :

Unfortunately, there are few bugs with unconnected faces and non manifold vertices/edges, as it’s a very early alpha of the Skin Modifier, those were to be expected.
But nothing to serious that a few more minutes can’t repair.
After fixing those, it can then be imported into Sculptris with no problem.

and a dozen of minutes toying with that Blender-made base shape in Sculptris :

Fun to notice how it is quicker to work from a base shape than to work from he default sphere. Maybe i’ll keep working on this dino in the future.

Blender-Scultpris is an awesome combo, and Mr Bishop skin modifier is definitively not just some random feature, but an extremely usefull new tool for sculptors to quickly sketch a base mesh for working on it later.
I hope he will keep up at it, the potential and usefullness is very good.

Looking nice :).

I have problems with the skin modifiers hehehe .

Good work anyway (Y)