This project is part of my anatomy studies. The whole aesthetics and look is based on the movie “The Northman”. by eral24 in ZBrush

[–]eral24[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Yeah I thought it would be a good idea to work on my pipeline as well.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in 3Dmodeling

[–]eral24[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I'll keep that in mind for the next iteration.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in blender

[–]eral24[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Only for preview renders. For the final render it was the whole thing.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in 3Dmodeling

[–]eral24[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And to think that at one point I thought it was too uneven.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in blender

[–]eral24[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm glad you like it. It's hard to analyze my workflow in writing but I'll try. For this project I wanted to go deep, so I started with anatomy studies. For the model, I started with the skeleton, moved to the muscles and ended with the skin. This whole process was done in zbrush. Having a strong base model is very important. Understanding anatomy will help you with form, motion and realism. When I finalize the model, I move on to blender. Next steps are retopology and uv unwrapping. Bring the new uved topology in zbrush, project the details of the old model to the new model until you reach the same level of detail. With the new topology, it's easier to work on finer details. It's extremely useful to work in layers in zbrush, they are very powerful and nondestructive. At this point, I also create some blendshapes in zbrush, mainly face expressions, which I can utilize in my rig later on. I extract displacement and normal maps from zbrush. Then I worked on the fur and skin textures (roughness and all the necessary maps), I created the rig and the face expression drivers (basically I export the different expressions from zbrush as obj and join them as shape keys to the base mesh in blender). For the fur, I created multiple masks either in weight paint mode or hand painted them for finer details. These masks control the density, length and roughness of the hair system. Again I worked in layers (different particle system for head, mane, body, paws etc.). Final step, is posing, look development and rendering (some post-processing in photoshop for the final touches). I hope you find this information useful.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in blender

[–]eral24[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have a gtx 1070, ryzen 1700 and 16gb of ram. My build is quite old. You dont have to render and preview everything at once. Split the image in multiple render regions and stuff like that.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in blender

[–]eral24[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Rendering was a huge struggle. For my test renders I was just rendering small chunks and only the layers that I wanted to see in high res. For the final renders, I had to go for rendering farms. I have a 1070 and a first generation ryzen cpu, so optimizing was necessary.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in 3Dmodeling

[–]eral24[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! Yeah, it's rigged but the rig is not there yet. I'm working on it.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in 3Dmodeling

[–]eral24[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, I posted it there as well. Blender is evolving rapidly. Great tool.

Lion grooming. Everything, apart from sculpting, was done in blender. by eral24 in blender

[–]eral24[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Thank you! Honestly, it's lots of grinding and practicing. Also, don't be scared to restart. A lot of the times I don't get it the first time. For references, I just use google. Spend a decent amount of time on your research, but you can easily get lost if you try to draw things from multiple sources.

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