Digital Sculpting week 9_ Finals

So week 9 marks the end of my Intro to Digital Sculpting course at Gnomon.  It has been an amazing few weeks and I feel that I have improved massively in that time.  I want to say a big thank you to our tutor Madeleine Scott-Spencer and a shout out to all my classmates too, it was so fun to watch everyone develop their skills :)
So here is my final submission for the course :)

So here is my little goblin gang! Really happy how these guys turned out but I did have a little trouble getting the painted style to really work so that's my next goal :) Madeleine gave us all some good advice as to how to approach painting in this style so I will give that a shot next time!

Here is the technical breakdown showing the low poly versions of the models complete with their color, ambient occlusion and normal maps.  I might take these guys through rigging soon and try them out in Unreal!! but I have to brush up on my Maya rigging first.

So all in all if you had told me this was my work 10 weeks ago I would not have believed it :p I really recommend The Digital Sculpting course at Gnomon to anyone interested in learning the software it has been such a fun ride!

Digital Sculpting Week 08

 Week 08: This week we worked on rendering, lighting and post processing in PhotoShop.  I had actually sculpted the body for this goblin a few weeks back when we had a cancelled class. So this week I finished sculpting the head and built all the accessories.  I am honestly surprised at how nicely the rendering worked on this guy.  Once combined with the Ambient Occlusion and shadow passes the character really popped!

There were a few issues with posing him however since his little arms aren't quite big enough to hold his club up high and make a nice silhouette.

The brief for next week's (last week for the course) homework is literally "do something" :p So I think I'm going to keep working on these guys.  Our lesson was in exporting normal, texture and bump maps so I think I will build a series of goblin characters e.g warrior, mage, archer etc and then retopologise and UV them and if I have enough time put them into Unreal :D wish me luck!

Digital Sculpting Week 07_ Texture Projecting

Week 07.  Unlike last weeks painting style this type is done by projecting photos onto the 3D sculpt.  This means that you can paint a lot more in a much shorter time though its a little harder to get the same amount of control.  So long as your reference photos are well lit and high resolution the results are pretty good.  I got my reference pics from 3D.sk, its a good resource for all kinds of human reference photos.  I spent most of my time sculpting this character.  Rather than build her in a T-pose and then pose I decided to model the pose straight away.  This guaranteed I would get a good pose without having to fight Zbrush over rigging but it did make isolating areas like the face and hands a little tricky when it came to painting.
This was also my first time trying out Fibermesh for the hair.  I am quite happy with the result but Scott actually taught us some good techniques I will implement next time I try it out. Namely building up the hair in separate passes rather than building it all at once and struggling with the fiber brushes.
This weeks homework is all about lighting and rendering so I am revisiting a project I had worked on a few weeks back and really beefing it out to be rendered it's already looking real nice so I hope it will result in a good render!  I am also thinking of picking up a copy of Keyshot since one of my classmates has been submitting his work with Keyshot renders and they look sooooo nice! So it will probably be a good idea for portfolio pieces just to make the sculpts really pop!