My mission to understand the ZBrush to Arnold via Substance Painter workflow continues! This is a test render of the robots head to see how the base material is looking (the eyes will be glass in the final render). Last night I spent a few hours trying to learn how to bake sculpted detail into a normal map for use inside of painter. For this project the material will be really important because the model itself is very simple and is made of almost all one material. I want to give it loads of character so most of the colour and roughness is hand painted, I want to avoid falling into the trap of relying purely on procedural stuff. I sculpted all of the metal imperfections inside of ZBrush so that I'm not purely relying on the material itself to drive the overall look. This is just the base material, there's still alot of subtle tweaking to do but so far I'm pretty happy with how it's going. Now I know what I'm doing (sort of) I'll be finishing off the body and posing it tonight so that I can spend more time getting the materials looking how I want them. I'm posting this so that I have some kind of record of my development that I can refer back to but would also really appreciate any feedback

This is a quick test render of a robot based on a Matt Dixon illustration to see how my new model is shaping up. I've decided to model something slightly more complex that I can have fun texturing, my main aim is to figure out the process of taking a model from ZBrush into Substance Painter and then rendering it in Arnold/Maya. I'm figuring out Zmodeller so wanted to do some hard-modelling but had to take it back into Maya for some parts where I'm more comfortable manipulating the polygons. I need to tweak some proportions and then sculpt some fine detail to give him some character then I'll see how I get on with the texturing. Peace

Finally found time to finish figuring out displacement maps and Arnold/Maya. For this mini-project I had 2 main goals: work on producing a cleaner sculpt in Zbrush and then to nail down the workflow from ZBrush to Maya for renders. I'm really happy with the workflow now, it gave me a few headaches figuring it all out but I'm glad I did. My next goal is keep pushing on with my sculting and to learn to integrate Substance Painter/Designer into my workflow, I've used them before with hard modelling in Maya and love the results but not tried to take a detailed model from Zbrush into them yet so will have to figure it out. Cheers!

Here's a quick BPR render of my latest sculpt. This time I've been focusing on cleaner lines and a more polished model. It's based on a Kevin Keele illustration, he's an awesome artist, check him out. It started as a speed sculpt but I decided to spend some more time tidying it up. There's lots of things about this sculpt that I'm unhappy with but I've learned alot and am starting to feel really comfortable using my tablet with Zbrush. Tomorrow (if I get time) I'm planning to finish it off, retopo and UV it so that I can take it into Arnold/Maya for some better renders. I've been really struggling with the workflow for taking displacement from Zbrush to Arnold but earlier today I cracked it, woooohooooooooooooo! I swear I could've punched the bloody sky when it worked. Peace

Hi All! So... For the last year or so I've been learning to model in Maya, then I discovered Zbrush. For the last couple of months I've been wrestling with it, trying to learn it's mysterious ways and I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. Recently I've been getting bogged down in the technical aspects of modelling and decided to go right back to basics and just sculpt. I've been so inspired by the amazing images on this site for the last few months I thought it was about time I posted something myself. I found some amazing illustrations by an artist called Kevin Keele, he draws lovely stylized characters so they're perfect for sculpting. To keep things creative, fun and simple I gave myself 3 hours to create a model and sculpted with just Dynamesh and two brushes (clay buildup and Dam Standard). When I finished the model I used a couple of the clay brushes to add a bit of texture, rendered the model in Zbrush and tweaked it in Photoshop (I really need to learn how to composite images properly). My next goal is to learn how to carry the high frequency detail of a model into Arnold/Maya so that I can have a mess around with some procedural materials that I've been creating, so far I've had mixed results but will keep plugging away at it. Anyhoo, enough of my waffling, here's my render, feel free to point and laugh or offer feedback. Cheers! Bosh.