All things at the same place

 Well, after years of not posting anything, I'm here again.

I have been very very busy on various things like work and kids and maybe a bit too much of video games, but I had a void to fill in terms of doing creative stuff.

The robot collection kept me busy and doing restorations was pretty fun and I wanted to do something a bit different, but at the end I'm pretty sure it will lead to doing toys or statues.

For the past few months I've been spending my free time to do stylized 3D characters. I'm a good fan of Shane Olson's work, a 3D artist who's mainly doing stylized characters and I decided to jump into his course and go back to do things I like. I'm doing my job because I like 3D characters and I've been doing tons of things that have push me into various directions always linked to my passion for 3D, but not to the basic things I truly like.

So with some free time this year it was about time to do it.

Here's four images of what I've been doing, probably more to come in the future. And I have to say that when I see ho cheap 3D printers have become, it's pretty tempting to get a nice one and start printing some of my models. I have a certain idea in mind, it will take a few weeks or maybe months as I'm a bit slow on things for the moment. But I hope that this idea will come to life. It's a character based on a drawing from a very talented artist, like all the things I've done this year, but I don't know why I had a real crush on that image and I have a clear idea of how and what it will be.

So here the very first image I did when joining the 3D course.

The original artwork is from Mike Henry. He did a really good job on the lighting of his character and I wanted to capture that too. The model is done in Zbrush, textures in Substance Painter, and for the rendr it was done with Marmoset Toolbag. Also some post process on the images with Affinity photo.

All this was also a good occasion for me to try to learn new tools and expand a bit my skills. I've spend so much years supervising people, that at some point I didn't had time to use the latest tools and there's always been some kind of frustration to not touch the images anymore, even if supervising is important, doing things is quite satisfying too.

The second project is some kind of cross over between a statue from Sideshow Collectibles and character design from Josh Black. I came across a really nice fight scene between Batman and Superman, really dynamic but more in a semi realistic comic book style. And I saw some great design of the Justice League made by Josh Black and I really liked the styles of his characters.

So this is the result of the mix of all that. That one also gave me the idea to maybe print it for me one day as it might look bloody cool if it's well painted.

Once again it was modeled in Zbrush, with textures in Substance Painter and the render was done in Marmoset Toolbag with some post process with Affinity photo.

And here's the third one. It is based on a design from Creature Box. There was some contest a few years ago in the course I'm doing and the theme was to pick a design from the guys at Creature Box. They are doing really amazing things and that specific contest was one of the things that I really liked about the course. The idea that there's some themes like that to push the students.

So I decided to pick one, even if that contest is long gone, but just for the fun of it and that character is pretty crazy. It was done for some game character for Ratchet and Clank

Here again, the usual trio of 3D software and Affinity to give the final grade and touch up.

It's kind of funny as I've been working at the office with Maya and Photoshop and I'm going another way for my personal stuff. This is mainly linked by the fact that those two are pretty expensive and also by the fact that I like to explore things and learn new software. I've also experiment a bit Blender for the render as it start to give nice results since a few versions.

Ok, now the last one I did was more for doing a female character. Somehow since I'm a kid I've almost never draw female characters. Always super heroes, monsters, spaceships all those nerdy boys stuff. I wanted to leave my comfort zone and try it and I came across a nice artwork from Sacha Tudvaseva. I decided to give it a try, it was slow as I was really not confident. But at the end, she looks pretty cool I think. For that one I did a first version of render with Marmoset Toolbag but last week, our beloved Shane Olson did a render using Maverick Render. It's a recent software and after downloading the trial version of it, I decided to go for it and test it properly with my Snake Girl project.

So here's the result of that experiment

So even if this blog has been dead for some years now, I wanted to do this post so everything is at the same place, and even if this is not toy related anymore, it's still about doing creative stuff during my freetime.

And speaking about old hobby, for the moment I've start painting miniature figures like I was doing 30 years ago. Might do a post about that when my experiment with modern painting techniques will be done. Somehow even if it's a different medium, I have the impression that all this is linked, but like I was saying it could be a nice topic for a future post that probably nobody will read :)