HMC #25 - The Oceans - Sea Turtle Diorama

[robo3687]

sounds good joel....i'm waiting on a response from roberto before i put my entry up...i want to do something silly with a real sea creature but don't know if its allowed....also have something lined up if realistic is the only way to go

[RageOfAges]

Cool Paul. I hope your idea pans out. I'm quoting the following from the challenge page:

Some of the types of entries I would like to see all THREE categories are: Predator & Prey, Humorous, Animal Combat, Encounters a and Animal & Habitat.

Hopefully for you that means that your entry will be allowed. Good luck!

-rage

[robo3687]

oh i didn't even see that....lol...well then i guess i'm in....

[MightyReg]

That sound like an excellent schedule. Hope you will be able to stick to it.
Sea turtles are really nice subjects, good luck!

[valentious]

really interesting concept.id like to see ure workflow in the up coming weeks.
good luck 2 u all

[valentious]

WHY CAN'T I UPLOAD MY PICS.
all of a sudden it won't upload.
i use image shack before and every thing works fine i just paste in the link but nothing happens

never mind this post
there was a prop with image shack

[japetus]

Good luck Rage!

[RageOfAges]

Thanks japetus. Good luck to you as well. That Isopod you're tackling is BAD-ASS-ness!

Valentious: Lol your mini rage made me laugh. Glad you figured it out.

Here's my reference for the pose.

http://images2.layoutsparks.com/1/208451/sea-turtle-swim-water.jpg


-rage

[RageOfAges]

Initial blocking out stages of the shell.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_01.jpg

-rage

[RageOfAges]

Finished the base for the shell and tail. From there I will extrude the body and fins. Need to do some research first, though. Gotta find out how those fins move. I've got about 200 images of turtles (easy to find on google images-turtles are very photogenic apparently), and those fins move in really weird ways.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_02.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_02-02.jpg

I can't help but throw in a little factoid here. I went to the cayman islands about 3 years ago and they have a turtle farm (for food, which can't be sold off the island as it is a protected species). Learned a lot of cool stuff there. The coolest, I found, was that turtles always remain wild. They can be in captivity for 100 years, but release them and they know instantly what to do for food, where to go to get preganant and lay eggs, and good luck catching them again.

-rage

[RageOfAges]

Base mesh nearly complete. Now I'm going to spend the next little while looking at all my references, examining the flow of the scale and skins, and retopologizing areas that might become problematic in zbrush otherwise.

Both front and back fins are a little skinnier than they are supposed to be. This was done on purpose so I can have a little legroom in ZB.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_03-02.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_03-03.jpg

I actually didn't expect this to go so smoothly. This will give me 19 days to work exclusively in zbrush as per my self imposed schedule. Sweet!

-rage

[TheRazorsEdge]

Great choice of subject and good start here, Joel!

I loved to watch these peaceful and amazing creatures whenever I had the good fortune to run into them while snorkeling. How many individuals are you going to put into your diorama?

Looking forward to more.

Cheers!

[RageOfAges]

Hey Felix.

Yeah, these creatures are amazing. I love how they are so ridiculously clumsy outside of water, but in the ocean they are extremely graceful. That, and the fact that they are living dinosaurs is also pretty awesome.

I plan on including two specimens in the scene, as in the image a few posts up. I will frame them with coral, and include schools of various reef fish around them to bring them to life. It is quite common to see hordes of fish around them, using the turtle both as protection, and also as a source of food ( the plankton that grows on their shells).

-Rage

[angel]

Very nice start, I have done night diving in a spot in the Bahamas where a bunch of Hawksbill and Leatherback sea turtles go to sleep. You have to be careful as not to wake them up or they can get scared and drown.

Looking forward to this one for sure.

[RageOfAges]

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you pixologic. You belong in the halls of Mount Olympus, amongst other gods.

UV's at the click of a button. While it is not perfect, it is a helluva good start.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_04.jpg

-rage

[japetus]

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you pixologic. You belong in the halls of Mount Olympus, amongst other gods.

UV's at the click of a button. While it is not perfect, it is a helluva good start.



-rage

Whoa! Is that Zbrush R3.5 R3? Where's that command??

[RageOfAges]

It's a new - ish plugin. You can grab it from pixologic.com, under support/downloads. I had checked out the video but hadn't played with it on anything but a sphere.

-rage

[MightyReg]

UV Master sure is great when you don't want to spend an eternity doing UV's. If you use polygroups it can give even better results with the UV's. I am in love with this plugin :)

[TiMrozek]

Yeah, UV master is the best thing since intelligent life.

[RageOfAges]

I've set up my polygroups to be able to maximize efficiency while working the different plates that make up the shell. I've also split each fin into its own group, as well as the head and belly as separate groups.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_05-01.jpg

The small edgeloop group (in yellow) towards the outside of the shell is there for testing purposes. Once I rough that area up a bit, I will isolate that ring, then deflate it to create a little ridge. I hope it works well, but it's a plan for the future so I won't get to it for a while.

That's it for tonight. Gotta go to work now :(

-rage

[TheRazorsEdge]

Yeah, UV Master is a true blessing. It still doesn't replace headus UVLayout for me though.

Two is a good number! You might want to include some bizarre coral formations for dramatic effect. Are you planning to do caustics?

Cheers and keep the update coming.:arteest:

[RageOfAges]

I actually spent a bit of time building up bases for various coral and fish. I'm at work right now and can`t be sure, but I think I have bases for 9 fish and 6 coral so far - very very basic meshes. I'll post them up when I get back home.

As for caustics, what I was thinking of doing is just basic clay render for the challenge. Once it is complete, taking it into the WIP/critique forum for texture and rendering WIP. Caustics would come then.

-rage

[Intervain]

nice and methodical so far - I like your choice - would be awesome to see him fully textured and rendered ... keep it coming!

[RageOfAges]

Thanks for dropping in Magda. Any way I can convince you to hop aboard on this one? Watching your work IS a treat!

Well, as I mentioned here are some bases for scene clutter. Unfortunately I did deviate from my schedule, but only because zb was making me mad at a certain point (I was getting frustrated selecting my polygroups - I kept hiding polys I couldn't see because I didn't have doublesided on :blush: ). I decided to just give it a rest for a bit to cool my frustration. So I browsed through my gazillion turtle refs and took a look at the various coral and fish that was included in some of them.

It took me about an hour to get all of these done. Thought I had more fish, though. Guess not. I'll probably make more eventually. Regardless, I'll only revisit these guys once the turtle is finished.

They will be replicated in Modo to produce colonies. Replicators are incredible. My pc can handle about 2 billion polys when using them. So much nicer than instances, and I've been looking for an excuse to use them for more than just fooling around. I can't find the scene anymore, but one test I ran gave me a render time increase of 1m42s. From 250k polys to 1.7billion with replicators. I love them almost as much as I love UVmaster.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_06.jpg

-rage

[JasonTonks]

I really enjoy your workflow presentation posts Rage.

Can't wait to see that badass turtle basking in its habitat! :)

[RageOfAges]

Thank you Jason for the kinds words.

I've started exploring forms and getting a feel for the anatomy. A little more complicated than I had first imagined. A pleasant surprise :applause: . The head was lightly touched on, mostly to isolate major areas. The end result will not look as though The Joker and a sock puppet had a baby.

70% was done with the move tool, but I also used standard, dam-standard, flatten, snakehook and transpose.

I used the following image quite a bit to reference the fins.

http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/images-3/sea-turtle-1.jpg

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_07-03.jpg

-rage

[menthol]

Hey pal,

I don't know if the proportions are still in progress, you might wanna check his head, it's quite different. And shell seems a lil too flat.

Considering that high poly, you got your I7 PC, eh? Gratzy :D

Have fun!
Cheerio~

[RageOfAges]

Haha thanks Menthol. Yeah this beast is awesome. ZB runs smooth at 20m polys on a single subtool. Like butter.

About the proportions. They are quite off indeed on that reference. Some other images I was looking at shows more compact faces, but it is not very accurate on those either. I will be concentrating on that for the next update. Thanks for bringing it up!

-rage

[TiMrozek]

Lookin good Rage. So, new rig eh? Nice,I have an i7 but I'm still running a 32 bit OS so I'm still a tad limited on Ram, time for win7 soon I guess.

Just thought I'd send this to ya in case you haven't seen it, pretty cool turtle model.. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=65258

[RageOfAges]

Actually I've had it for about almost a year now. I think I brought it up during the 80's cartoon challenge. Lol I can't believe he remembered that. Yeah I highly recommend getting win 7. It's not that expensive if you get it online from stores such as newegg.

I love that image. I've revisited it many many times since it was first published. It gives such a warm feeling. Really reminds me of the lost boys from Hook. So imaginative.

I spent some time working on the proportions of the head. Looking better but still not exactly as I want it. I also tweaked the shape of the shell as per Menthol's suggestion. I'm going for a green sea turtle, however, and they tend to have relatively flat shells compared to other sea turtles.

For the shell, I up-res'd to around 7m polys and dropped into projection master with polyframe on. I painted in the plates, then once out of PM masked by intensity. Reverse Mask/deflate gave me some nice results. I also inflated slightly the entire shell while everything else was hidden. This gave me some guides to work with for later on, and helped break the monotony of the form. Those hard edges will all be smoothed down the road.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_08-02.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_08-03.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_08-04.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_08-05.jpg

-Rage

[TheRazorsEdge]

Wow, that's a lot of sealife you want to include there. Great, I cant wait to see it all come to life!

I think your turtle is a bit on the flat side, btw and some volume in Y would help improve its look. Also increasing the depth and height of the shell patters might get you a better visual read for volume and contour/ more contour detail for the light to play with.

Keep up the great work!

Cheers!

[RageOfAges]

Thanks for the input Felix. Many images show many different shapes, and some green sea turtles are quite flat looking, however I took your advice and scaled in Y a little and it looks much better!

As for the shell, it was all in the program.

This is a small update. I used the detail on the shell as a guide, carved in with Dam-standard and tightened it all up with pinch. Carved into the head in the same manner. There is still a LOT more work to do in that area, though. I keep upresing to 7m polys to get some solid guides in, then downresing and deleting higher to keep it at about 400k. I don't really want to go into too much micro detail yet until I work out the bigger forms. Silhouette must look just right.

Chantelle, my girlfriend, pointed me towards this image a while back, suggesting I could throw it into my texture collection. Well I had forgotten about it, and it came up again last night. It is perfect for this model. It comes from APOD (astronomy picture of the day). I'll let you guys follow the link to see what I'm talking about.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100416.html

Here are the updates:

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_09.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_09-02.jpg

Cheers

-Rage

[TheRazorsEdge]

Hey Joel, what's up with you and your turtle? Hope all is well on your end.

Cheers!

[RageOfAges]

Just had a busy few weeks and lost a little inspiration due to stress and fatigue. I'm digging back into it right now. Hope I can keep it up :)

Thanks for the pep talk. Twist my arm. Alright, I'll keep going.

-rage

[RageOfAges]

Spent most of the time tonight making alphas and testing them. They seem to be most effective with an RF of 15-20.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/turtlehead_01.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/turtlefin_02.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/turtlefin_01.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/turtleshell_01.jpg

I noticed a few sea turtle entries since I last updated. Feel free to grab those alphas if you guys want. And anyone else as well, of course. There will be more coming. Currently working on 5 others.

And the tests. I laid out high frequency detail for the underlying texture, as the larger scales seem to be nicely settled on top of this. I will run a global smooth to tone it down a little, but I want to get the larger scales laid out properly before I do this.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_10-02.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_10-01.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_10-03.jpg
-godeshus

[angel]

This is looking really sharp man, don't really have anything meaningful to add as a crit, keep going!

[TiMrozek]

Awesome man! You really put a lot in since your last post. Lookin real nice.

[RageOfAges]

Angel: Thanks man.

Tim: Lol thanks. Actually that was only about 2 hours work since last post. Plus the time to browse through alpha potential images and then making them, which was about 3 hours.

This next update has a little more to it though. For the neck I used a combination of a) Inflate brush with alpha 25, dots stroke and B)the following alpha, clay brush eith drag rect.

Alpha was made from the image of sunspots I linked to above. Desaturated and played with levels, brightness/contrast, and a few other similar basic tweaks. Again, feel free to grab.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/turtleskin_01.jpg

And the update:

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_11_01.jpg

This is the same image, but with levels tweaked greatly to the darks. I wanted to show the microdetail differently.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_11_02.jpg


The head area scales are not exactly accurate. The scales should be much larger, without any microdetailing really. I liked the way this looked, however, so I'll be leaving it for now.



-rage

[TheRazorsEdge]

Very nice work on the alphas and detailing, Joel!
Are you going to texture all those creatures you have been planning to build or going for a clay render?

Cheers!

[RageOfAges]

Thanks Felix.

I'm still going to go for it. Turtle is almost finished, or at least close to an acceptable level, and we have until June 5th. If I don't get all the other fish and coral finished, I should still have enough environment done to do something close to what I wanted.

-rage

[japetus]

Wow, great job with the shell and the turtle flesh! My only comment would be to watch a bit of stretching around the leading edge of the front fins, but this looks really great!

[RageOfAges]

Thanks Japetus. Indeed, that area is giving me a little trouble. I'll mot likely end up smoothing that entire leading edge and starting over. It needs larger, lower frequency detail anyway.

Took a little break from the turtle to start setting up my environment and composition. For the reefs, I want to lay down some basic noisy texture, then populate it with the different coral I have modeled. We'll see how it goes.

The reef is at 3 m polys right now. I'm thinking of opting for decimation master and loading the geometry directly into modo without any displacement maps. I'll see how low poly I can get it down to.

I also plan on sculpting a stingray directly into seabed, as if he were semi buried in the sand. I hope time permits.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_12-01.jpg

-g

[RageOfAges]

And some work on the coral.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_13-01.jpg

-rage

[RageOfAges]

And some work on the fish:

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_14-01.jpg



-rage

[japetus]

Ooh I like your sea plants a lot! That will really add a nice atmosphere. need to start thinking of the environment for mine too...

[Luke046]

Mm nice corals and fishy. I´m also doing corals, fun forms and amazing colors to work with. Looking forward to see your final render.

cheers

[chichiri]

The turtle is nice, you managed to make all the details.

[RageOfAges]

Thanks for the kind words everyone.

Well, not much time spent on this this week. Time's running out, too. I spent some time blocking in my scene in zbrush with the elements that I have currently for referencing inside of Modo. I've also posed the turtles. I hope to have a chance to get back to the fins. I'm not happy with them, but I'd rather have a chance to submit this by the june 5th.

So now, into Modo to try and set some stuff up. I'll get to the rest of the coral and fishies later.

(right click/view in new tab for larger image).

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_15_01.jpg

-rage

[chichiri]

Nice work so far, I love the background and the turtles, they're both really detailed.

[aovesen]

Thats a great scene you have there and the detail on the turtles + the pose looks great :) Wonderful work.

[TheRazorsEdge]

Looks really sweet so far! :buttrock:

Personally, I would not overlap the turtles themselves and the fish so much though, but space them out some more. Looks really crowded in some places.

Cheers!

[RageOfAges]

Suggestion noted Felix. I believe I will keep the scene cluttered, however, and rely on lighting to isolate the key players.

Basic replicator and nomal/disp testing in modo here. I love replicators. 48 million polys rendered in 3m28s. Basic post work done to make the render slightly more interesting. I think I will opt for using less dense coral on the ground, and substituting for grass type vegetation.

http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll52/hades4president/WIP%20HMC%2025%20Oceans/WIP_16_01.jpg

-rage

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.