It has been some time since my last upload to NEWGROUNDS. I have not forgotten about you, I promise. Lately I've been studying 3D and, luckily for me, also started to work as a 3D artist at my favourite VFX company Important Looking Pirates. This has taken up quite a bit of my free time, but the urge to create fun internet stuff is still there.
Final render of Tore. Y'know the tortoise?
The new 3D art the title tells about is of a tortoise. A tortoise named "Tore", more specifically. This has been a project to train some creature sculpting in Zbrush, and how a Zbrush to Mari workflow could work. I learned a lot.
Basically I started to block it out in Maya. At this stage it looks ugly, but is easy to handle due to the extreme "low-poly-ness" of it all. I can freely change the proportions without any hassle. This is then exported into Zbrush. Here the highpoly-tortoise is made. A lowpoly version is also created with nice UVs. By using polygroups and the built-in UV-creator in Zbrush this was a neat not too hairpulling process. If I'd try making the UVs in Maya, it would most likely not be slow... it would be super slow. At least it has been in the past when creating UVs for quite highpoly meshes. Note that this lowpoly tortoise is still a pretty heavy dude. Not the neatest for the machine.
After the low- and highpoly have been exported, xNormals was used to bake bump, AO, e.t.c. This since this beast of a program can handle being thown crazy highpoly objects. Cool. Now Mari comes into the picture. I didn't use any images for texturing, besides from alphas and brushes. This is a "hand painted" project in many ways. Well... besides the generated masks. Mari is a great program but sucks at generating interesting masks. Seeeegway to Substance Painter. A program increasingly more and more fitting for VFX-work. After some cool masks were generated this was all sent into C4D where it was lit and rendered with my favorite: Octane. Oh, octane. You can manage to render even the highpol stuff on a potato without every frame taking hours.
Turntable of tortoise.
It was a neat project to play around with. Since I might put this in a showreel at some point, I thought I should make a quick render of it as well. Static images do often not work that great in a showreel. At least that's my opinion.
If you have any questions just ask away in the comments below! Please check this artwork out on its "actual" page here at NEWGROUNDS (always looks cooler in caps) and give it a rating. Hopefully a good rating. Thank you and good bye!
https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/carr77/tore-the-tortoise
