Heres a few screen grabs of the finished shell and props in ZBrush.  It’s been a hell of a learning experience to get to this point… it’s certainly made me really appreciate the really good ZBrushers I’ve seen out there.  The fins are half finished, I’ll try to have them ready and posted up here soon.

Apologies for the lack of updates recently – I haven’t had much free time, however I put some time aside this weekend to sculpt up the turtle’s shell.  Gonna finish up those bordering ’scutes’ then integrate the props.

Been unusually busy this past week or so, but managed to finish up the props for the Turtle.

Upped the subdivisions and refined the basemesh today.  Gonna start detailing tomorrow.

Blocked in the proportions and finished modeling the low-poly basemesh of the turtle today.
Now it’s time to take him into ZBrush and have some fun.

The name of the next project I’m going to be working on is called ‘The Sky Fisherman’.  It’s inspired by this phenominal concept sketch done by Stoph over at CA.org.  Looks to be a challenging piece, but I really think it has some wonderful 3D potential.

Finished up the Gonodolier today!
Heres a few views from ZBrush:

And here he is brought back into MAX for future rendering:

It’s been a huge learning experience thus far – this was my first character since learning ZBrush.  I’m fairly happy with how he’s turned out, still a few areas here and there that bother me, but it’ll have to do for now… on to bigger and better things.

He’s not going to be textured or properly lit just yet – I’m gonna try to stay in a modeling mindset and create a few more characters before going back and polishing them off as final portfolio pieces.

Had some nasty issues with the new TransposeMaster plugin for ZBrush these past few days, but finally ironed out the bugs yesterday and got to posing the gondolier today.  Hands aren’t fully posed yet - but you can kinda see how he’ll be grabbing the oar of the gondola.  This is probably be the last update till the model is finished!

Finished up the gondolier’s shirt today.  It’s my first time really dealing with cloth and I’m finding it pretty challenging to say the least - though pretty happy with the result thus far.  Tried to go for a thin and breathable look, like silk.

This project is entering the home stretch now - I’m going to make one final pass over the whole model to clean up and unify anything I’ve missed, then put him in the final pose with the transpose tools, and he’s done!

Been busy finishing up some freelance work, so I haven’t gotten to spend too much time on the gondolier the past week, but I managed to finish off the pants today.  I’m waiting till he’s in the final pose to define the flow of the folds any further.  I think its alright for now.

Worked a bit on the hat and belt in my free time.  Just have the pants and shirt left to do… then he’ll almost be finished!

Here are the nearly finished shoes – Nothing too fancy.  I think I’ll give it one more quick pass to emphasize the seams a bit more.

Spent some time refining the arms and defining some of the sylized musculature to go along with the face.  There’s still a few things I’ve got to fix here and there, but I think it’s almost there.  Note: The fingers are currently in a ‘half-pose’ to be ready for gripping the oar of the gondola.

Happy New Year!  Hope your 2007 was as good as mine, and heres to a great 2008!
Pretty much all done with the Gondolier’s high res face… moving on to sculpt the rest of the body.

Getting back to work now that the christmas frenzy is over…  I’ve decided to have the gondolier in a singing pose to give him an extra bit of character, and went ahead and posed his face before the geometry gets too complex.