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Chapter Start: Flames | Page 01


Full Color-quality (16-bit) version on Weasyl!

No Text Version Here!
Rejected Shots Here!


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These Final Gathering only scenes are a whole lot quicker to render than the apartment setting. If it weren't for the noses, many of them would be below 1 hour. Depending on the size of the schnoz, usually according to how close up on the face a shot is, the longer a render will usually take. All else being fair, that tends to make our big friend here the slowest to render of them all XD

And certainly, he is big! Yeltsin sitting down makes the comparison hard, of course. His sculpt has grown much more detailed since the initial attempt at it, though I've had some trouble bringing the details through. Something I tried this time around, that I haven't with other ZBrush sculpts, is exporting a normal tangent map along with it. Ostensibly, it should slot into the bump map to give directional bump and accentuate the finer grooves and shaping in the right lighting that tends to get lost through the sculpt cage and export process I require. Originally, he was the only character with a bump map in use at all, specifically to give him abs that I couldn't get in Maya without retopologizing him. That was before the sculpt process proved itself much more amicable to detailing and improving the baseline meshes on a per-pose basis. Still not exactly happy with that "per-pose" bit, but it seems inescapable and at least I've tailored it to my requirements somewhat. Anyways, the bump normal tangent thing. I often struggle to say for certain that it's having any impact, actually. I've experimented a fair bit and I can definitely see it make a difference in the preview viewport against a Maya-based shader, but I can't really say it's noticeable with my Mental Ray shader network. Not entirely sure why. The less said about the true displacement experiments, however, the better. o.o

Admittedly, there's not much motion in this one but I'm glad to have it to practice and improve on sculpting and working with our new fellow here. I do think I still need more practice with sculpting his features, however. His arms especially look strangely small from many angles and oddly warped. I also thought the page was important from the perspective of these two interacting and to help characterize the big guy beyond "attractive meat brick", expounding upon the hint of sensitivity presented before.