3D Digital Art Sculpting and Character Concept Show Reels

   Well a few days ago I started to work on my digital 3d character concepts show reel ... or well demo reel for work I do.  My intent is to show my skills in many different digital media applications and programs. I will finish my demo reel in Maya via and animation of my works that I modeled, sculpted textured  and painted in Zbrush, Maya, Blender 2.64 and Adobe Photoshop. If I decide to use more programs on this project I will mention them here as I go along and also put them in the credits of the demo reel. To start I did some rough sketches and sculpts of my ideas for the scenes I wish to create ... I have decided that I will do 3 scenes, and these are to all show off what I have learned in these programs as well to set moods and environments that change through the 3 different scenes as well to show character emotion through the animation  of the models that I created.  I will add some background sounds and music though the work should stand for itself with or without the sound. I am doing this as well as having a still art portfolio because the reality is that most people want the people modeling the assets and characters in 3d to also be able to and have a knowledge of the rigging and set up.  I do agree that a strong knowledge of a rigging character deformation in animation and topology are the difference between a character that has problems and one that works and is believable when it is animated.  But before I go to that extent I needed to decide how I would do all this, what the scenes would look like, environments, characters, landscape and assets ... etc  ...  So for my rough set up first off I went and found many reference photos of landscapes similar to the 3d landscape I will be modeling. Many that contain fish that will help me with my modeling and sculpting as well as corral, plants and anything else that will aid in my research and work.  After this we come to the point I am at now and that is setting up rough 3d sketches of these scenes. With rough models and landscaping for the scenes, I as well have been creating other brushes and materials for this project and planning any vfx for the animations. I also have been recording my work flow via digital images so I can show the documentation of what work I did along the way.  For example here are some rough sketches of my first scene digitally sculpted in Zbrush using dynamesh. For these sketches I used and outline and a sketch material from zbrush. 

Again these are just some rough 3d concept sketches in zbrush.  These will all be modeled detailed colored and textured in zbrush then the models will be imported to maya for rigging ,animation, shading and lighting.  Some parts may be worked on in blender as well.

Here are the 3d rough models that will next be detailed in sbrush.

   As you can see these are just rough models ... but this will give me a place to start from. After I do the texturing, the sculpting and the topology again if needed then I will make normal maps as well for export with the uvs textures and any other map that is needed .

I will post the next scene i n a day or so and let you see the rough draft of that as well some individual renders of some of my models working on in zbrush.

New digital and character art using the new Zbrush 4 R 3

Here are some of the images I have done in the last two weeks from works modeled in Zbrush 4R3 which is one of the most useful tools around. I have used other tools for example blender 2.6 which does have sculpting capabilities as well as 3d modeling abilities. But I would not have been able to make this in blender. First off I used the zsphere and zsphere 2 meshing capabilities and then sculpted from what I made using them. in the other case of the head that was a square turned into a circle and then later made into dynamesh.  here is a picture of the head I did ...

It is still a work in progress for now. I need to do the gums /teeth as well I need to material it in zbrush and then will do a texture painting for it as well ...  You can do almost all of it in zbrush at this point with the fiber mesh funtions can even do hair. 

  Also in Zbrush I sculpted the this Mansect and also at this point I have set up surface materials and will continue on with my work on it. 

This is after I used zbrush to sculpt and draw it then I posed him better and skinned him in zbrush. Then well I will show you below.

First I used z spheres and z spheres 2  in order to form the mesh or skin. Then next as you after I get this shape I work some more and then next I skinned the mesh I had created.

This is the mansect after I did some more sculpting on the mesh again using zbrush 4r3. Here is also more of a sketch look of him using the black and white sketch  materials

 and then well this is more pictures of him where I have currently gotten him to as well.

and from the front then after this from the side

I will post more again soon of this model as well as others.