desert cave snuggler

Since I had been modeling a lot architecture lately, it was fun to do something pure 2D and organic again. Some of my friends looking at my recent creatures thought I should do something more cute - so here we go. This creature lives in the desert but stays inside caves during the heat of the day. When it is getting dark and the ground is cooling down it goes on its hunt for little insects or some delicious flowers. It is about the size of a cat, maybe a little bit bigger. Pure Photoshop work, no 3D here.

saurian guy

This one started as a quick sculpt in Zbrush. After a quick remesh I brought it into Mari, did some textures and reworked the sculpt based on that color reference. Rendered in Maya, I finalized him in Photoshop.

Tree Snatcher

The Tree Snatcher creature lives in the tree tops. It's tail usually dangles down below the branch it sits on. With the moist and smelly part, it attracts lots of insects, which in turn lure bigger prey close to the snapping claws. Once caught, there is no escape and the prey gets brought towards the mouth area of the Tree Snatcher where it injects a poisonous and decomposing liquid. Very much like spiders digest their catch. I started and finished this one as pure 2D in Photoshop.

fish creature

Started as a head/bust Zbrush doodle, I took this one further and gave him a body too. Also I remeshed him and prepared a Maya file for animation, though this will take some more time to finish. As a concept for texturing I rendered him in Maya and did some paint over in Photoshop.

DeWalt 20V max render / some more iray

To gain some more knowledge on iray for maya, I recently spent some time to set up this scene (NURBS drill model by Onur Aytekin). Since iray for maya handles its custom passes through light path expressions it was a good opportunity to look into that too. The final render took about 9 hr on my machine in 3.5 K resolution. As with the last project, defining materials and light setup in iray for maya is just a pleasure!

Wasteland Stalker (design and model by Paul Braddock)

Recently I have completed a CGS Workshop "Animal Skin and Scales in Mari 2.6" taught by Alwyn Hunt. This is the final result. The "bare" model was provided (i.e. no bump or displacement). All texturing, lighting and rendering was done by me.

perfume flacon / iray testing

Here is something that might please my commercial clients a bit more! I was testing Iray for Maya recently and had to come up with a project not too labour intense, so I could get into testing quite soon. I decided upon doing a perfume bottle and after sketching some rough silhouettes I went into modeling. The bottle was done in Maya, while for the background I did some detailing in Zbrush. Especially setting lights in real time and tweaking material attributes was a great pleasure. Iray itself is fairly easy to learn and a lot is self explanatory. To use Iray at full speed your entire scene has to fit into your graphics memory, which is not possible with geometry heavy scenes or when you have very large textures. All in all, using it was a good experience though I am lacking a bit the possibility to fake certain things. But that is inherent in the tool -  it "only" gives you real world behaviour ;) Obviously I put some post work into the final image in Photoshop.