ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

An experiment in balancing teaching myself Z brush, maintaining a full time freelance business in print design, full-time maid at home, while being distracted by the increasingly insane antics of my dog rufus, and my 2 cats insatiable appetite for food...

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Final render 1. lots of re modelling of the mech concept, tweaking the pilot sculpt and refining the characters. 

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z brush sculpt with key shot lighting

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3d artwork of coin operated ride...

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Final render 1. lots of re modelling of the mech concept, tweaking the pilot sculpt and refining the characters. 

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Its been a while since I’ve posted, not least because my workload has been chaotic since january but I’ve been developing a new personal project and just enjoying the process of creativity without feeling the need to post updates all the time. I felt that the Hatamoto sculpt had gone so well that it was time to develop my own series of mech characters based on what id learnt in z brush and keyshot. this is a test render and the first of hopefully many other poses / render tests. the central canopy opens to reveal a pilot inside and the controls for the mech (I’m still working on the interior), the goal being to also sculpt the pilot and then 3d print the entire thing as  a kit. as personal projects go, my goal was to work more quickly than hatamoto sculpt which i spent around 3 months on - this is probably a 3rd of that time in and around my other workload so its good to have learnt some valuable problem solving lessons for that sculpt which made life way easier on this new sculpt. Will post more renders / turntable pics later…..

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Finally finished my rendered photoshop comp. Lots of keyshot renders went into making this, plus a lot of background assets I pulled together from various sources and friends. I really wanted to make this look like some of my favourite japanese model packaging, theres something frenetic and immediate about the scene that they capture in those pieces of artwork and I had a lot of fun throwing everything at the image and pulling back some of the carnage to clean it up a little. I wanted it to look a little like the last stand so really went at the model with various rust and paint damage passes in keyshot, brining it all into photoshop and extracting the sections using masques and transparencies. I may or may not do some more poses later on with the finished Z BRUSH model but time to move onto a few more exciting projects that I have lined up over the coming months. Will post a turntable of the final model another time..... 

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Been working hard on this refining it, these are test renders, using keyshot. Looking forward to finishing this sculpt, working with some more poses and rendering out into photoshop. Then its onto 3d printing it.... should be an interesting experiment using our new hi res printer...

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work in progress. i was asked to sculpt a mech based on the HATAMOTO SHIN battle mech from the battle tech game. Been really hammering this last few months where i had free time, its come a long way since starting, namely working in those details, refining the forms, a lot of scarping sections and resculpting 2 or 3 times, but its finally coming together in a way that i think reflects the original models but is also a slightly more modern approach to it visually. Because Zbrush allows you to add so much detailing in, i wanted to avoid just copying the simplified shapes of the 2 inch high figures and give it a more dynamic feel to the very angular shapes of the original design... 

I'm hoping to finish it over the next few weeks but as usual real life gets in the way....

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model turntable of alien queen sculpt…..

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So I finally got round to sculpting the setpiece for the Alien Queen model, really wanted to test how lighting in situ helped with the final rendered scene. I’m really pleased with how this has come out, lighting using specular and diffuse lights was a totally different approach to my rendering technique so i was surprised the results came out as nicely as they did.  If anything finding the unique angle to render at was the trickiest part. 

The Alien Queen was probably one of the monsters that along with the predator had a profound effect on me growing up. There was just something so terrifying about in onscreen that it took me multiple watches to finally get through the film (i was 8 at the time) My dad was also equally as impressed by it and couldnt wait to show it when the vhs rental became available sometime in (i think) 87. Ive had a real roller coaster ride with this sculpt, really hope it does stan winston studios justice as a fan tribute. finally, its time to move onto a new project…  

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So I finally got round to sculpting the setpiece for the Alien Queen model, really wanted to test how lighting in situ helped with the final rendered scene. I'm really pleased with how this has come out, lighting using specular and diffuse lights was a totally different approach to my rendering technique so i was surprised the results came out as nicely as they did.  If anything finding the unique angle to render at was the trickiest part. 

The Alien Queen was probably one of the monsters that along with the predator had a profound effect on me growing up. There was just something so terrifying about in onscreen that it took me multiple watches to finally get through the film (i was 8 at the time) My dad was also equally as impressed by it and couldnt wait to show it when the vhs rental became available sometime in (i think) 87. Ive had a real roller coaster ride with this sculpt, really hope it does stan winston studios justice as a fan tribute. finally, its time to move onto a new project...  

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model turntable of alien queen sculpt.....

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FINALLY. sculpt is finished. 4 months (on and off) of some pretty intense hard lessons in fixing shitty mesh problems. zremesher/ dynamesh and project all (plus some damn good guides) really helped save the day with this. 

For the paint job i went with blue which a lot of the toys do as I'm then able to control the tonal values in photoshop much easier, the results came out really nicely with this comp i think. theres a few more comps i want to try as well as a key shot render, but I'm pleased with this. even if the scene (or pose for that matter) aren't super exciting in this composition, I'm hoping to be able to have a little more fun with that in another idea i have based on some of the old dark horse comic covers from the early 90′s. Im certainly looking forward to starting a new project soon. 

I found some nice aliens colonial marines screenshots of hadleys hope on google, thought very lightly used it was less abusing someones else's hard work and just adding a hint of the movies environment. Hope they would agree ;0)

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I’ve been to the seventh level of hell and back with this sculpt over the last month or so since last posting; refining, resculpting, refining the refined bits, then remeshing, reprojecting details, only to restart the process over and over again. It felt maddening, but then with it an immense feeling of satisfaction seeing all the hard work and tough choices begin to matter. 

 I sculpt in my spare time, grabbing any hour or so that i can spare, since this is not my day job the extra stress of having to teach myself has certainly been straining recently but i can really really see just how much all the hard work has been worth it on this sculpt. If you remember, (well if anyone is crazy enough to follow my ramblings on here) i first tackled this character around a year ago when i began teaching myself to digitally sculpt, ‘it was pretty bad first attempt but I was chuffed id even managed to teach myself how to do that at the time’. You can see on this post that original version of the model as well as how the new version is coming along. Ive just started texturing the model after a really heavy cleanup of the mesh and re-projecting all the details. I’ve learnt the hard way about how important keeping the mesh clean and with just quads (where possible ) is. Triangles brutally caused me loads of frustrations when it came to texture work as i HAD decimated the model a little too early (it had reached 40 million points). Cleaning up the mesh and earning how to use the projection features has certainly been a massive reward for learning how to control my workflow better. 

Im fast approaching the finishing line, before painting, sculpting quickly a corridor scene for lighting, and then the fun part of rendering and comping in photoshop… Looking forward to starting something new, BEFORE i totally lose the plot having been on this sculpt for so long…..

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I’ve been to the seventh level of hell and back with this sculpt over the last month or so since last posting; refining, resculpting, refining the refined bits, then remeshing, reprojecting details, only to restart the process over and over again. It felt maddening, but then with it an immense feeling of satisfaction seeing all the hard work and tough choices begin to matter. 

 I sculpt in my spare time, grabbing any hour or so that i can spare, since this is not my day job the extra stress of having to teach myself has certainly been straining recently but i can really really see just how much all the hard work has been worth it on this sculpt. If you remember, (well if anyone is crazy enough to follow my ramblings on here) i first tackled this character around a year ago when i began teaching myself to digitally sculpt, ‘it was pretty bad first attempt but I was chuffed id even managed to teach myself how to do that at the time’. You can see on this post that original version of the model as well as how the new version is coming along. Ive just started texturing the model after a really heavy cleanup of the mesh and re-projecting all the details. I’ve learnt the hard way about how important keeping the mesh clean and with just quads (where possible ) is. Triangles brutally caused me loads of frustrations when it came to texture work as i HAD decimated the model a little too early (it had reached 40 million points). Cleaning up the mesh and earning how to use the projection features has certainly been a massive reward for learning how to control my workflow better. 

Im fast approaching the finishing line, before painting, sculpting quickly a corridor scene for lighting, and then the fun part of rendering and comping in photoshop… Looking forward to starting something new, BEFORE i totally lose the plot having been on this sculpt for so long…..

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So Im still sculpting this, there’s various areas need some work such as the legs (I re-sculpted these 5 times, just couldn't get the right feel) I also re-sculpted the head crown and the face twice as it just wasn't working with my lighting tests (i do this regularly to test how its looking, importing to keyshot really helps to see how a model looks in realtime). Finally got those up-to-scratch, the crest needs refining but i will figure that out near the end when other details are sorted.  i can then move onto the set piece (this is more for lighting, i figure a corridor set-piece is apt and would really be a nice scene to light this in....

Once this is done, I'm finally moving into sculpting my own creations as opposed to favourite movie characters, seems the right time, between this and the predator sculpt I've learnt a great deal about techniques, i think importantly I've learnt that sometimes instead of trying to save bad areas of sculpt, and wasting hours getting nowhere, its best to just start the section again doing what you actually need... I've certainly wasted a lot of hours on doing just that with this project....

Now, to finish this...