My Labz Contest entry | Skull Tee Shirt Design | More Photoshop Brush Work

I designed this skull for the artsprojekt and Zazzle Labz Contest: http://www.artsprojekt.com/labz_contest

The design made it into the top picks but didn't win. Either way it was a really fun piece and I posted it on my Zazzle gallery! Again I made heavy use of downloaded photoshop brushes.

My Skull Tee Design Here

"A Gothic design of a demonic, ethereal skull in space surrounded by dark green energies."

Free High-Quality 3D Human Skull Model (obj + ztl)

I remember a while back when I was looking for a free 3D skull model over the web but could never find any high quality and FREE 3D skull model to download and so I gave up.

Well when you actively look for things they're never to be found, but they pop right up when you least expect them. I was browsing the web today when out of the blue I found a very high-quality and free skull model on a fellow Zbrush artist's blog.

This great Zbrush artist's Zbrush name is SolidSnakexxx, you can find his blog here:
http://zbrusher.wordpress.com

and his free 3D human skull post here:
FREE 3D Skull Model (obj + ztl)

Warlord

This illustration is another one of my personal favorites. It's an illustration of a futuristic, cyborg, elite warlord who has an air of elegance about him and combines styles from th new and the old. He is partly inspired by Metal Gear Solid art as you would probably guess if you were a Metal Gear Solid fan, and particularly by one of Yoji Shinkawa's depictions of Raiden, especially for the pose and the sword - rifle combination.

(You may also notice a Palestinian flag colored in the drape, which is something personal I added as a Palestinian)

This model landed me a few features such as a CG Arena Excellence Award, a Making Of Warlord tutorial, and a zbrushcentral turntable gallery entry.

You can see my Zbrush WIP here.

Mental Ray Project - Death Knight

Another project with Autodesk Maya and Mental Ray.

This time however I also started learning more advanced features such as HDR Image based lighting, Final Gather and Global Illumination, as well as the mi Arch shaders applied with all sorts of metal properties and maps for the armor. Mental Ray is as amazing for shading and rendering as it is frustrating, and renders can take forever if you don't optimize your scene!

There was a point at which I had abandoned this project for a while since my PC kept crashing during renders. But then, having no other choice, I watched a Gnomon DVD about mental ray so that I could optimize my scene to make it renderable without crashing:
Mental Ray Fundamentals by Matt Hartle.

And so for those of you who are struggling with complex scenes and mental ray or are serious about mental ray and have a weak PC (as I only had 2GB of RAM for instance), I would strongly recommend that you research and learn the technical aspects of mental ray thoroughly even if it means a couple hours of your time, and it cetainly took me a few days. I know that as artists you would naturally avoid wasting so much time to learn such technical things but sometimes that time spent can save you lots of hours wasted in buggy renders, crashes and frustrations in the future!

SSS Skin Shading Project

I had recently played around with Subsurface shading and shaded a character that I had sculpted in Zbrush using SSS in order to become more familiar with lighting, shading and rendering features in Autodesk Maya.

I used an extensive Skin Shading tutorial by Alex Alvarez from Gnomonology.com to guide me, and I would recommend it to anyone pursuing realistic skin-shading.

In my experience, Maya can often be so technical for the artist that it's frustrating to the limit. That's why I love the intuitive Zbrush and Photoshop which is for artists rather than technicians on the otherhand, and that's why most of my previous projects were created and rendered using these two programs. However, I do understand that an external renderer can never be replaced and that's why I pushed myself to learn SSS for once and for all. Here are the results:

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Orc

Once again, another Warcraft inspired artpiece, this one directly based on a 2D concept of Grom HellScream by warcraft artist Samwise Dider.

As you can tell by now, I am largely inspired and driven by Warcraft art, and in fact Warcraft and Blizzard art are the main sources of inspiration that pushed me into character design and fantasy art in the first place. I owe a lot to them, as I probably wouldn't be where I currently am artistically otherwise. In any case, I've still got so much more to improve.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Medical Symbol Caduceus

I created this Zbrush sculpt as a logo for a medical society in my university (Edinburgh University). But this one had a twist in that one of the snakes extends into a DNA strand, which was definitely interesting to model! And it was a nice break from all of my character modeling.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Demonic Vampire

And yet another demon, this one is my own design, again Zbrush and Photoshop. Out of all my works, this is the only one which gave me the creeps while working on it. I felt I was a bit messed up to make this, but I went all the way and it was fun nevertheless! And crazy with all the details! I hope you like this one.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Demon

Yet another Warcraft inspired charcter art. This time it's directly based upon a 2D black-and-white sketch by warcraft artist Chris Metzen.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Elf

This one's a warcraft inspired elf that I modeled in Zbrush and rendered and colored in photoshop.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Dwarf

More Zbrush sculpts, but this time of a Warcraft inspired Dwarf.

This work involved the heavy use of several baroque alphas for projecting all the fine detail, and of course the standard brush, stitch-brush, and lazy mouse to brush them on.

You can see the full WIP thread here:

Photoshop Brushes Doodle (2008)

I had recently watched a very instructive Gnomon DVD about matte painting from the Gnomon Workshop.

Although matte painting is definitely not my field, this DVD certainly inspired me for a moment and so I wasted no time and downloaded a heap of Photoshop brushes. They're easy to find on the web if you google them but if you're interested you can start looking for some here. Trust me when I tell you that Photoshop brushes can do wonders while saving so much time, especially when combined with layer effects and other photoshop features etc.

This is something I whipped up in just under an hour after playing around with my free downloaded brushes (it's not much to look at but it says something about photoshop brushes - I think). The workflow for this was simply using a combination of ready-made downloaded brushes for rocks, leaves, clouds, hills, ocean, the bird, etc, all just composited into this one image, no manual handpainting but only composition.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Assault Rifles

More Zbrush sculpts, but this time with most of the work being hard-edged modeling in Silo. These are two assault rifles that I modeled:

Check out my Accessories thread on zbrushcentral for more.

Zbrush Sculpts 2008 - Lexar

This is another of my earlier Zbrush sculpts, a tough character who you wouldn't wanna meet in an alley!

Check out my Accessories thread on zbrushcentral for more.

Troll Shadow Hunter (Dec 2007)

For my first blog post I will start with one of my personal favorite artworks. This would normally be an archive as I had made this in December 2007, but either way, I will post my older works first.

This is the Troll Shadow Hunter. It's directly based and inspired by a Warcraft 2D concept by Blizzard artist Samwise Didier, and I created this model entirely in Zbrush, and colored and rendered it in entirely in Photoshop.

The entire WIP thread can be viewed here:
The high-res final version can be viewed here: