animal portraits

These are some images from a series of animal portraits I have done last year for a fine art book print project. They where sculpted in ZBrush, textured in Mari and rendered in Maya with Arnold. The fur was done in Shave and a Haircut.

Mercedes Benz print commercial concepts and render

Last year I have been working on a couple of print campaigns for Mercedes Benz, which required several designs and models for background buildings. They all had to follow to a certain degree MB corporate identity, so I did some sketches first and after the client made her decision, I went into Maya and built the models. Above is the finished model for a MB store with a small garage to the right. This "preview" rendering was done in iray for Maya. Below are the concepts for the store as well as some for a separate garage and "grey-shaded" renderings.

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!