As promised here is the alien in the 3D Creative of this month!

I really like that I got featured in the Gallery section as the background image and then in a 2 page spread

I’m also supposed to be featured in 3D Artist but the copies in Quebec arrive about a month late so lets see…

And as usual, having the fake hair bothering me I went back and decided to fix it…
As I mentioned I wanted to avoid hair and fur and the pains it brings with mental ray so I decided to use the old school planes method.

And here is the rendered version. I’m quite happy with the results with just a day’s work. I’m still getting some ugly artefacts in her legs that I have to sort out, but apart from that I’m really liking it.
The hair needs further tweaking, mostly color variation and maybe a bit more length. Also now the eyebrows pop out a lot more as “fake”. And yes, I’ll fix the belly button!

I feel this is it for now, fixed most of the issues and calibrated the image as much as I can for now. I like the lighting and painterly feeling but the hair isn’t there yet, it just doesn’t seem to fit with the rest..
I’ve also tried to add more green to balance out the strong red of the hair and working with typography again to place a title, almost like a sequel to “The Interview”. (click on the picture to enlarge)

I’ll also use this post to share the panther work I did that was supposed to be in the same image as her. She isn’t final and I still wanted to work more on the anatomy and expression to push it that bit further but once I realize it didn’t fit in the composition I stopped.  (click on the picture to enlarge)

A couple more days of tweaking and getting much happier with the results. I fixed the eyes, the skin shader and overall anatomy/texture. Still need to fix that damn ugly bellybutton as well as the artefacts in the legs. I also feel the hair might need a bit more polish, I wanted it to have that velvet feeling that you almost want to touch it and right now its more squid like…

Here are the 2 current renders, one in Zbrush and the other Max… she could also use a bit of a smile, might re-work the expression too.

Even tough I haven’t updated the blog in some time I’ve been doing quite a lot of work. I always end up accumulating all the stuff and then just dump it all  in one post…

First the alien that I showed last week, its going to get published in 2 magazines this month!! 3DCreative and 3DArtist, will take some photos as soon as I receive the magazines.
Also  good friend from work has been rigging him for an interesting idea that we came up with, all still very much under wraps.

In the meantime I’ve been going over the girl that I showed before, lots and lots of variations and poses until I decided to add a panther to the composition. I also re-did her haircut to something longer so it would frame her small head better. Here are some of the results:

Latest version of the panther and the girl. I also updated the anatomy on the animal, mostly the front paws, pectoral area and jaw.

Original version with shorter hair.

From the start I wanted a stylized picture and the focus was on anatomy, composition and lighting. But as the render got more realistic, the lack of fur on the panther and the polygonal hair started to pop out. I tried to sculpt the fur in Zbrush but it never looks realistic enough, always comes out with that “statue” feeling to it.
To do this properly I would need to use Hair and Fur for max which I’ve read its a bit of a pain for shadows and compositing with mental ray and not the goal I had for this work.

So….. I’ve removed the panther from the picture (learned a lot about animal anatomy in the meantime) and started to work on the light and composition of the girl alone. The breasts still feel like balloons, something that I really don’t want and haven’t nailed the legs anatomy for this pose yet, need to get some proper reference.
Finally, all these renders, its the mesh from Zbrush in a mid level subdivision so all the little details aren’t showing properly, that is why she is so “washed out”.