Some tests in Marmoset Toolbag 4. Keeping everything super loose still as I am planning on adding the prosthetics he has in the movie and a facial expression. I think the likeness is close enough for this default pose, so I'll probably move onto xgen now. Hopefully I'll dial in the likeness and realism a lot further as I get more of the pieces together.
It's been done a lot, but wanted to take a stab at this likeness of Heath Ledger from The Dark Knight for ages now. I'm recording the process and will make an in-depth tutorial to go along with it. Its very early yet, just blocking in the main landmarks and establishing likeness (along with running some facial expression tests)... But its been going smoothly and I wanted to share the progress. The Hair is most likely gonna be the most challenging here. And I noticed it changes a lot in the movie, so I want to really capture how dynamic it can be. Anyways, here is where I am at.
Some of my References:
I made a quick tutorial I would like to share since this is something I didn't know till recently and I think its super useful and not well documented. Simply put, in zbrush you might loose your morph target or layer but were careful to keep your vertex order the same on a model. Here is how you restore it so you can work more non-destructively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_wCRAMEB8M
My first attempt at painting portrait on iPad while I’m traveling for the holiday. As much as I love clip studio paint on the iPad, I don’t like monthly subscription and unfortunately they don’t even have an option for standalone licenses on the iPad. :(. Anyway I decided to give procreate a try while on vacation since I’m mostly limited to making art on my iPad on trains and airplanes. As usual, another game of thrones traditional portrait “Stannis”, hope you like it and let me know if you have any questions.
Early Wip:
Sorta been forgetting about the blog here on artstation. I’ve been working on all kinds of stuff tho as usual. I wonder does anyone find this useful? Please let me know in the comments so I can gauge the interest. Cause if it’s just me talking to myself I probably shouldn’t bother most the time. lol.
Anyway, I thought this was cool… I bought a laptop on sale with a 4090 i9 and 64 gb ram. It’s a beast, and the main goal was to try and do professional level art easily on the go.
I found out about easy canvas pro which essentially turns your iPad into a cintiq and let me tell you it’s pretty amazing! I also use a razor gamer pad thing which for the most part enables me to work entirely without a keyboard and super quick since it’s all hotkeyed.
Anyway, the plan is to eventually make a YouTube video on the setup cause I feel like most the demos you see out there are not really geared towards industry professionals. This tech isn’t exactly new for instance, I think it’s been around for a couple of years now.
I’m also learning blender, so I’ll go ahead and build this sculpt here to full quality and render 100% on my iPad via 1x usb c… laptop to ipad setup seen here. It’ll be good for me to learn blender and show what can be done with this setup.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions on this. I’m gonna follow thru with the artwork and tutorials either way, again just wondering if folks find value in the blog here.
Cheers,
Recorded my process for making a base head sculpt in zbrush from a sphere. The process should be part of a larger tutorial series I'm working on, so I can't share that yet. But, thought I'd share the mesh with the community incase anyone finds it helpful. Also, figured it would be nice to have a female base mesh as well, so I did a very quick sculpt of Daenery's Targaryen from GOT on a layer in zbrush. I didn't bother trying to spotlight match references or break A symmetry, so its really basic still. I hope I still captured some likeness, but I'm not totally sure honestly. Either way, I thought her face would work well as a generic female face as a starting point.
If you have any questions please let me know, thanks for looking! Oh, and besides being able to easily swap this mesh from a base male to female mesh, it also has uv's. :) Download the BaseMesh with Male/Female Morphtargets here:
This .ztl is compatible with zbrush 2022.0.7 and later.
If you want to know more about blocking in a head or practice yourself I have a bunch of content about this on my artstation here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dKLPGA
So I'm posting this knowing full well no one cares, but I think its cool so whatever... :D
We had a long weekend for Memorial day and I pretty much spent the whole thing painting these "deathguard" kill team models. Did most of what you see here over the last 3 days. I'm not expert miniature painter, just figuring this out and having fun doing it so now I'm sharing the work.
For those that know about deathguard, I'm not a fan of the tentacles and stuff, I like the idea of them being more like zombies. So I intentionally removed most of the tentacle bits of models and resculpted with green stuff where needed. Also used this "Soulblight Gravelord Deadwalker Zombie" models from age of Sigmar as a substitute for poxwalkers. (My version of poxwalkers and more representative of how I think they should look).
These are a few of the paintings I did over the holiday break. All done with clipstudio paint and my ipad, mostly on trains and airplanes and waiting for said trains and airplanes. I travel overseas a bunch and there is a lot of down time. The holiday trip was from Seattle, to New York, then to Finland and back again. I mentioned a few times previously, but I'm trying to paint most of the game of thrones characters as digital portraits to improve my painting abilities. I've actually started painting stuff traditionally as well with oil paint which has been a lot of fun. Hopefully later this year I'll feel confident enough to share some oil painting portraits (I'm still learning to use that material at this point).
Thanks for looking!
Decided to post up on the Blog one more time for my own records before I finish this off. It sorta helps me to find areas to improve by doing this. Right now my to do list is getting pretty reasonable. I want to re-texture the gun entirely and add blood sweat/dirt to everything similar to how Ryan looked like in the movie. I need to add those tiny facial hairs that go everywhere. Lastly I need to do some general polish and material tweaks. But everything is in place finally in Unreal 5 which is a relief because its my first time doing this. I love how performant Unreal is, its pretty crazy... I have a beefy machine but its almost like its not even rendering anything with how fast this runs and its doing real time raytracing and stuff with complex hair systems. This will def. be my main workflow moving forward. These are all just "high resolution screenshots" btw. I had a hell of a time figuring out how to get offline renders to work, but I finally managed to do it with the help of console commands. There is a really great tutorial on it incase anyone is interested I can link. Anyway, last time posting wip on this... I know I've said it a million times now but this time I'm determined. ;) haha. Its time to call this quits finally. Thanks to anyone that's been following along here, its been a long journey. Next post is beauty renders and stuff with final textures etc. on the old portfolio. cheers!
.jpg?1665692895)
