Steam Punk Gunfighter

[mash3d]

Hi, I had to put down the ww1 Tommy for a bit. I've been working on this figure for an art test for a job. Not exactly my style I just worked from the given art work. But I learned a lot from it. I still have to shoehorn it down to a 2000 polygon figure since it's for a game company.

The figure was pretty much all done in Zbrush with dynamesh and mesh extraction. I made a few base shapes in Modo. All textures were painted in Zbrush also.
I've made quite a few mistakes in the process that caused me a lot more work.
The biggest one was starting with a dyanmesh instead of a base mesh with a UV map.
Now I have to go back and make a re-topolgy mesh on top of the dynamesh, UV map it and re project the details and textures onto it.
Nothing major but tedious.
Nest time I'll make a simple base mesh, UV map it, duplicate it then turn it into a dynamesh.
That way i already have the base mesh ready for projecting.

Also the Clip curve doesn't really get rid of anything. it just squeezes the polys down to a flat plane.
I cut the left arm off and then days later did a re-projection. Magically the arm grew back.
So to really get rid of something you have to hide it and in Tools/geometry/modify topology tab hit
Delete hidden.

 

[Ron Tamburrini]

Thats a fun Piece

Ron

 

[DEL]

Thats a fun Piece

Ron

You wish

 

[DEL]

Very impressive work on this...lots to see. Great textures and depth.
Cheers
Derek

 

[mash3d]

Thanks for the compliments. The Gold color parts are really supposed to be brass and metal textures.
I still working out the best way to bake out materials in zbrush and mix them together.

 

[captnenglish]

I love steampunk, is ths a one off or will it be commercial?

 

[mash3d]

Hi, unfortunately I can't sell it as it's just a test I'm doing for a job.
I'm just displaying the images as part of my hopefully growing portfolio.
And share some of the lessons I learned from doing it.
Now if there's some interest in Steampunk figures I'm willing to look at doing more and producing them.
I think we are all still trying to figure out the economics and work flow of producing Digital figures and getting them printed out.
Hopefully a full digital work flow will allow more niche figures to be made that the main producers may not touch.
I don't know the numbers but I assume Pegaso etc have to produce hundreds of a given figure to turn a profit.

 

[Helm]

Looks real nice nice one

Steve

 

[RKapuaala]

They don't mass produce hundreds of figures to turn a profit. I have checked into manufacturing some of my figures and manufacturers here and in China have minimum quantities that they will run or they will not tool up for production. We are talking 1000nds of figures and that is at the first price level.
I do small productions of my pieces pooring them myself, because I can't devote that much of my liquid assets to a full blown production as it would take forever to recover my investment.
I have a work flow for 3D but it is still at a stage where it is just covering costs and enough to buy new tools from time to time that take my production to the next level of quality.

 

[Portal]

The Gold color parts are really supposed to be brass and metal textures.
I still working out the best way to bake out materials in zbrush and mix them together.

This is one area zbrush falls down, you are better off outputting the model into another app, re-alinging the UV's then adding a alpha layer to the specular channel to give the metallic areas some shine. Most people use maya but my weapon of choice is cinema 4D because of the bodypaint module and closer photoshop integration.

 

[megroot]

Stunning work, I really like your paintwork.
But I don't understand nothing what you wrote down about Zbrush and all that stuff.

Marc