Updating this. I wasn't really happy with the render, so I did a pretty basic paint over of the sculpt for fun.

A quick experiment with a character of mine using Zbrush, Marmoset 3, and photoshop for a project I've been working on. Will probably be doing more portraits like this soon.

Sculpt in Zbrush

Bonus eye I made following J Hill's awesome tutorial

Sorceress Minnie Mouse

I work for Hasbro sculpting mostly girls toys, but I can't use the majority of what I make in a portfolio until those products are released. So I decided to do a quick personal fan-art project in a similar spirit to what I do at work. I really liked the style of Tokyo Disney's Sorceress Minnie character so I wanted to adapt that into a mock-toy/figurine version. Sculpted in ZBrush, rendered in Keyshot. Project took me about 4 days total/30 hours including concept and render.

Experiments/Sketch Dump

Some sculpted pieces for a fantasy throne room environment I'm not going to finish.

Sculpted/Quick render/photoshop experiment.

These are just some 2D sketches/quick ideas.

Senior Project/Alien Catacomb/Zbrush Tutorial

As I was doing some maintenance on this blog I realized with the whirlwind that was graduation and starting my job at Hasbro I never posted my final senior year project. We didn't have much time for this project so I kept the environment pretty bare bones. I took one of the environments I had conceptualized in preproduction for the thesis pitch that didn't get chosen and used that as vague inspiration for this environment. I decided I wanted to learn Unity as part of the "learning outcome" portion of the assignment, so this was actually composed/lit/etc in Unity, which was surprisingly easy to learn coming from a background in UE4. Here's the final result, I had a lot of fun with it and tried to keep the assets within a fairly low scope.

Alien Catacombs

Also, part of the assignment was making a step by step tutorial. I decided to do my tutorial on my process for organic sculpting in Zbrush. Just in the last few months at Hasbro I've learned so much in Zbrush that this tutorial seems even more pedestrian than when I was making it. But if you'd like to know my process anyways, here's how I went about sculpting my assets for this environment:

Zbrush Workshop 2015-2016

In addition to working on thesis this last year I participated in a Zbrush workshop at school to create a 3D printing ready action figure. This was my second year in a row being selected for this workshop and both years were definitely a ton of fun, challenging, and overall huge learning opportunities,

These were my two initial concepts, ended up going with the bottom because my concept for the year before was a fairy girl and I wanted to do a huge muscly abomination for a challenge.

This one is random but I loved the way this material rendered out in keyshot, but it didn't catch enough detail to be used as my turn around so I experimented and made a crazy graphic background for fun.

Horsemen Finals and Process

We finished thesis this past week and will be releasing the final trailer soon, but in the mean time here's my final renders and my process for the horsemen sculpts. 

Final Renders: (These are keyshot and zbrush renders to show off the sculpts, in the actual thesis trailer they're composed in Unreal Engine 4 and rendered in in real time.)

Process:

Originally the idea for showing the horsemen in the trailer was going to be accomplished by creating them as 2D illustrations and then use parallax techniques in After Effects for animation. Similar to the trailers for the game Hearthstone.  However, after playing Dying Light and seeing the intro sequence the idea evolved. I decided to create the horsemen as high poly 3D sculpts composed with a more graphic background similar to Victorian style etching. The etching style was chosen as The Last Judgement, our thesis idea, takes place in the late 1800s when etching was popular for printing.

Examples of etching:

Initial VERY quick and dirty sketch when I was considering more of an Arthur Rackham inspired style. This is the only concept sketch I did for any of the horsemen, the rest were designed as I was sculpting in zbrush.

After the idea switched to 3D I needed to figure out a way to quickly iterate on poses. On top of these four I was sculpting an additional 2 fairly complex characters, so to stay on a realistic timeline I took base meshes from Zbrush and ran them through mixamo to get a character rig. Mixamo also has a rigged horse mesh. After getting my models/rigs from mixamo I took the characters and horse into maya and manually posed the characters and adjusted poses taken from Mixamo animations for the horses.

Here's an early result of that process, some of the poses obviously changed quite a bit after this initial take:

Compared to the final sculpts:

So the process for setting up the scenes in UE4 was fairly simple. I created a simple etched sky texture for the backgroud plane. Then for props I took screenshots of a few individual assets my partner and I had created in our environments and ran a photoshop filter over them to get the etching style. These were then set up as alpha planes and imported as assets into the engine. Some assets like the grass and a few piles of rubble are fully 3D assets we also used in the environment, their texture has just been desaturated to fit the scene. Fog, soot, and fire particles were added to the scene for more atmosphere.

 To create cohesion and add an extra layer of polish I found a pen and ink post process material on the unreal engine 4 marketplace and replaced the textures and settings with my own to get the final look.

And here's some progress shots of Death in the UE4 scenes.

Final trailer still:

And here are some screenshots of the rest of the horsemen in the trailer: