Portfolio update

mrBananas

Hey guys. I'm new here, so be gentle.
Basically I'm in the process of updating my portfolio, so I'm gonna be posting some new works here as long as I have free time for that stuff. Anyways, here's Devil's advocate I'm currently working on. Will probably start on the low poly this weekend.

Doonhinkun

I really like a lot the folds of the cloth and the four horns. How did you make the skin texture?

Doonhinkun

I really like the folds of the cloth and the four horn head. How did you make the texture of the skin?

deolol

overkill, less is more

mrBananas

Doonhinkun: The skin, and everything else, is hand sculpted.

deolol: Good call. I believe you're referring to the head and I kinda agree with that. The project started in 2009 though and the main purpose was to try my hand at detailing. Was going for a burnt skin kinda look.

YBourykina

nice job on the clothing, the folds are looking great
the skin is very busy, but i think it can work just fine with some good texturing, can't wait to see more

mrBananas

Thanks

I've actually went back and cleaned the head a little bit. The neck was giving me too much trouble, but I've decided to clean the whole thing. Will probably go with this look, can't afford to spend any more time on this guy.

Fnitrox

looking ace so far!

i also think that the business of the skin is sort of balanced with the softiness of the clothes even tho it might still be a bit too much

edit: this is way better! it also help to mitigate the butterfly mirroring effect that was really noticeable before

guhhh

Great model, love the cloth details! Can you share this zbrush materials?

mrBananas

Thanks, guys.

guhhh: One of the materials is from Ralf Stumpf matcap packs, so I can't really share it. As for the other one, just Google "zbrush l03 matcap" and it should be in the first link you'll get.
Here's the final update on the sculpt. Tweaked the silhouette a little bit and made some final changes to the head.
Also, made this just for fun. Might as well turn it into a full model someday

Blaisoid

nice, both models look really cool.

Benjamin

Very nice sculpt, can't wait to see how the low poly turns out! you know your anatomy quite well! professional stuff man!

mrBananas

Thanks, guys

Forgot his briefcase...

D4V1DC

Lol love the brief case!

alloa

It's look like han solo's suitcase.
Nice concept!

Add3r

That briefcase is SO AWESOME. I LOVE it. Its so creepy but every face/limb has a story. VERY well done on it man. Love it.

Ehsan Gamer

Love the briefcase .

Synyster

The concept for the briefcase is brilliant! It's so well executed! Everything is really fucking awesome man!

Bek

Now that, is very cool And Gman thinks HE has style..

Aga22

the briefcase is awesome , however i gotta point that the stretch folds around the faces and hands are too tight, it looks like someone burned it on thick plastic instead of leather. leather like a suitcase's won't do such tight folds, and "tucked in" around the faces and hands. personally, i would go for a more subtle effect. same for the facial features on the briefcase, they are too detailed for something pushed in through leather.

mrBananas

Thanks guys, glad you dig the briefcase

Aga22: That's a valid point for any situation, except for this one. First of all, if I was going to make it look like it's made out of leather, there wouldn't be any kind of detail whatsoever. The material these things are made of, is too thick and basically has no stretching at all to begin with. So instead of the faces and hands, you would see some bumps on the briefcase without any distinct features. And even if it was a lighter material like silk or thin rubber, most of the detail I have here wouldn't be visible either because of the stretching. Just some main landmarks like nose, cheeks, chins - that kind of stuff. The idea here is that the briefcase is, well for lack of a better word - magical. I was trying to capture the emotions of those "souls" trapped in it, and the only way to do it was to make this made up material.
I hope it made it clear I do appreciate your comment, though. I'm always open for any crits.

DJ_Aaron

Awesome Stuff Love the briefcase

Fenixy

dat case

mrBananas

Ok, I think I'm done with this guy. I really want to move on to something else. Had this guy in my head since 2009, time to let it go

I present to you Devil's Advocate

retleks

No offence, but for a piece this close to being great, you are doing it a huge disservice int he presentation department. No shadows? Very flat lighting. Put in another 3 hours and it'll look great.

mrBananas

Yup, I agree with you. Unfortunately rendering and composing is something I don't have much experience with. I altered the final render though

mrBananas

Here's a little something I dag up a couple of days ago. The model is very near and dear to me, because, first of all, this is one of my favorite characters of all time, and secondly - it's one of my fist characters that I've created. Made this guy back in 2007 but decided to give him a little make over. I'm planning to print this thing, so I might need to tighten some of the elements up. Also, I'm not quite sure about this yet, but I might add something in the background to spice the whole thing up a little bit. Got a couple of ideas:
1. Make his rocket ride thing crashed into the ground and standing almost vertically behind him
2. Model Evil The Cat and put him under Jim's foot
3. Craziest of them all - model ALL the villains, pile them up and put Jim on top of that mess. I think it's doable, gonna take hell of a lot of time though and probably a fortune to print it.
What do you think?

Speaking of printing, does anyone know any good places where I could check this stuff? With rates, examples etc etc. I haven't printed anything before so I'm really knew to this stuff.
Anyways, pics!


And the old version

BARDLER

mrBananas wrote: »

Yup, I agree with you. Unfortunately rendering and composing is something I don't have much experience with. I altered the final render though

Doesn't take much to learn a basic lighting setup to get good renders with. Your model would look 10 times better if you spent a few hours learning some basic lighting and rendering techniques in your 3D package of choice.

Saman

You could also improve the textures by adding more gradients and stuff. Make the clothes darker towards each end etc.

mrBananas

Thanks for the comments guys, I'll get back to the model, but for now it's put on hold.

Anyways, I've been asked a couple of times to make a video tutorial on how I sculpt clothes for my characters, so here's a little something. It's a piece for my new model, there will be a jacket as well, so that's why the back on the sculpt is so empty. But it should give an idea how sculpt.
Speaking of jackets, if I'm not busy tomorrow, I'll start working on that and record the process as well. If not tomorrow, I'll probably post something on weekend.

Here's how the sculpt turned out. Enjoy the video and hopefully it would be of a help to someone!




http://youtu.be/_di-Uad0z90

No support for Youtube? How do I embed videos here?

Aga22

dude that's awesome. thanks

PhoenixWolf

earthworm jim soooo goooooood XD

mrBananas

Here's the promised jacket video. I recorded pretty much the whole process except for the stitching, creation of zippers (insert brush), pockets and the collar. Here's the final result with a modified shirt from the previous video:




http://youtu.be/DMz03AN5zLQ

http://youtu.be/6gvjppLSAkM

http://youtu.be/l9XxVnQ4aec

PhoenixWolf

How? -___- im jelly

mrBananas

Update!

AlexCatMasterSupreme

mrBananas wrote: »

Yup, I agree with you. Unfortunately rendering and composing is something I don't have much experience with. I altered the final render though

Dude that is a great piece and put some more effort into it so it shows as such. I mean I can't describe how much you are really screwing yourself over by not working on the presentation more.

Furthermore if you're not good at it shouldn't you be trying to strengthen that skill?
Just my thoughts.

I mean you have fucking amazing sculpts, but if you work on that presentation it's the difference between meh and HOLY FUCK.

mrBananas

I'm also bad at animation, doesn't mean I need to study it harder
I get what you're saying, and you're right. The problem is, however, I'm more of a "technical" guy rather than artistic. It's not about me being bad at lightning, rendering etc, it's about my lack of vision of the lightning and other "presentation" things. I could learn that stuff I suppose, but right now I'm trying to get a job as a modeler, not a being-good-at-everything artist.

P.S. if it makes any difference, the "render" of Devil's advocate is a realtime screen grab from Marmoset.

mr_ace

hey man, nice job that new character's looking great.

my only issue is with the pants, presumably they're jeans, and because of the stuff below, presumably she's cut them off, and then is using those straps at the top of the tights to hold them on? This is a bit of a weird design decision imo, and even with this as the case, there's probably more bunching than there would likely be. i like the rest though

Shrike

Thats nonsense youre saying there. Dont tell me you are not that artistic if you get anatomy, clothing, folds and faces that right. You got an eye for aesthetics over the time, as everyone does, and Im 100% sure you can tell what looks good and what is not (exaggerated) on any not highly complex compository szene or image.

All you need to do is find the options you need to play with in your 3D program, and
play with it. You know what looks right, all you need is trying out.
Get a rim light, put 2 spots and crank up the options. AO and GI on, and fine.
Put a decent non-grey gradient in the background or get some hi-res texture there,
A little color correction, maybe some blur, and you have a great looking image.

All you need for a great render is a great model, and you got those. The rest is playing around, having fun and be amazed how you stuff looks under a certain light.

mrBananas

mr_ace: Good eye! I wasn't sure what to do with the pants. I started them out as something made out of fabric but then switched to leather. Right now, everything except the knees is leather. I might tone down the details in there a little bit and make them more "crisp".

Shrike: Thanks, that's a good post Being good at anatomy or understanding how cloth work has absolutely nothing to do with being artistic. If I used that knowledge and skill to make something stylized or completely original, that's a different thing. And sure, I can certainly tell what looks good and what isn't, but if we go back to Devil's advocate, I don't see anything bad with it. To me it looks good the way it is right now. I know it can look better, but I don't know how to achieve that "awesome" look.

I'm confused what we're talking about here actually. I had some comments regarding Devil composition but it looks like you're talking about my recent updates. If so, I'm not even trying to make them look good presentation wise. Those are just screen grabs taken directly from ZBrush. Those are all WIPs. I want people to see the actual raw model without any distractions so they can tell if it looks good or not. For the final piece I'll make something more interesting for sure.
But thanks for comment, I do appreciate it. I don't have the luxury of spending time on learning all the rendering techniques at the moment, but once I'm done with all the modeling sutff I've planned here, I'll probably get to it.

mrBananas

Test pose, quick render and MP5K close up. Next stop, building low poly and texturing.

Elod.H

I want briefcases like those

jeremiah_bigley

Well Well Well... look who it is!

I didn't recognize you without your threedy forum name. It has been a while. Good to see some of your stuff again man. That earthworm jim model is the best across the internet imo. And your most recent female is really kick ass. All the cloth is really believable down to even the strap on the gun.

Keep up the awesome work. I look forward to the low and textures.

mrBananas

Elod.H: I heard you can get those in hell

jeremiah_bigley: Hey man, it's been a while! Good to see you around here

SA_22

earth worm jim looks awesome!.. chick is insane!... and that jacket....................... :poly115:

mr_ace

mp5k looks great, and the render and pose is really nice too. What is it rendered in, and how did you pose the high poly?

BradMyers82

You def. have some really good modeling and sculpting skills, texturing looks good too.

If you are indeed completely stumped on the rendering part, it might be a really good learning opportunity if you released the model and textures to give other people a shot at demonstrating what they are talking about with rendering. I would imagine people would be willing to do that, since you have such cool stuff to begin with. I would give it a shot at least.

Not sure how you would feel about actually releasing your work, but just thought I would suggest it.

mrBananas

mr_ace: I used mental ray and Andrew Nash' "Fake it" pack and some post work in PS. I didn't have any time to tweak the render settings, so basically used the default ones. Will definitely play around with those once I'm done with the model.
As for the pose, I went with Skin Wrap technique in MAX. It worked really well for my previous model, but in this case, I should've just used the transpoe tools in ZBrush. Had tons of things to clean up after exporting the model from MAX. The technique works best when the model isn't so heavy on objects/accessories I suppose.

mrBananas

BradMyers82: I've done that a couple of times actually. It's good in a way that I do get to see what could be done to a model in terms of texturing, presentation and all those things. The problem is, however, is that, I do have a blurry image of the complete piece every time I make something. But when I get a render of one my models from someone else - it's their vision of the model and final piece. I've done this twice, and both times I was disappointed. Even though on a pure technical level, the works were well done.
It's kind of tricky. Ideally it would be to send someone a model I don't really care about. But I won't make anything good if I don't care about what I'm doing

Slipstream

Gorgeous work good sir. And excellent test render
And thanks for posting those videos!

mrBananas

Slipstream: No problem

Hey guys, need your help here! I can't decide what colors to go with, so if you like any of those or if you think a different combinations would work better, please let me know.
Thanks!