… Not quite but pretty close. I have rendered the first part of the film and composit together with background and foreground elements. Stuff to do before this first segment is truly done are to include Gudrun, the foxy lady, and render some secondary shadow passes to be applied on top of the background elements.

Watch the current version

If there ever were a more buzzie Buzz word. I just had to test if this would add anything to the apperence of Nitchi. After some struggle with the installation of MISSS contained in the Maya Bonustools 6.0 I made to produce this image. Quite nice but it needs some tweaks untill it looks realistic. Right now it looks like he have been running a marathon.

This is how the texture looks so far. Not sure about it, it feels rather faint, not much details. Will do some more work on his wounds and then update the displacement map with some new wrinkles and scars.

All night I dreamt about displacement maps, gee I wonder why my girlfriend looked stranged at me when I told her this during breafast. Anyhow, searched the web for clues regarding the spikes. I regenerated the map over and over again with different settings but no luck. Still the same pointi lip for Nitchi. It wasn’t untill I wanted to try out a completely different map when I realised that Maya was getting its displacement info from a file called test.map and I was regenerating a file called Displacement.map . Damn this has costed me 3 hours of work and made me dream about displacement maps instead of my girlfriend

Well I had to dig really deep in my archive to find this guy. The original design is roughly 5 years old back when I was a student. He was meant for a shortfilm never produced by me and Alain Rivard. But enough history, I needed a face to sculpt and him beeing the only non comic characters in my collection made the choise easy.

After a couple of days trying out Zbrush he started to take shape. I must say the Zbrush really let’s the artist create without worring about correct polysplits etc. You just paint at different subdivisions and the tool is very responsive even with models with more the a million polygons. The texture is temporary because I need more time to get comfortable with painting textures in Zbrush.

Workflow so far has been:

1. Cleanup the original mesh in Maya (Making it all quads)
2. Importing to Zbrush as OBJ and start sculpting while looking at allot of reference pictures. I can really recommend surgical books because they tend to really include allot of details.
3. Arrange the UVs in Maya using a pelt plugin
4. Import a UV ready obj file to match the lowest Zbrush resolution
5. Generate all kinds of maps in Zbrush; Normal map, Displacement Map, Cavity map.
6. Assemble everyting in maya and hit render.

I got some strange artifacts around his lips, sharp spikes points out for no apperent reason.