Decided to give Arthur a companion in the form of a manically depressed robot. I modelled the head in blender, but then thought I’d try doing some hard surface stuff in ZB for the body, so I roughed out some quick basemeshes and then imported them into zbrush.
Basemesh parts + Modelled head in blender:
WIP Sculpting in ZB:
Hello Ben, cool entry you have here, and original too 
The pose gains a lot with the head and face expression and adding the robot is a nice touch. I’m curious to see your hard sculpt in Zbrush, I still have issues with it, so now I still model hard surfaces, at least the more intricate ones, in Blender.
Keep it up!
Started some proper modelling and retopo in blender:
Update: Did some hands and feet too.
“I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed…”
“Life. don’t talk to me about life.” 
Did a little v-ray render of marvin, I made his hands bigger too, they were looking a little small.
@lbelerique, GerR: Yeah I hope to put them both in the same scene and render them together in v-Ray.
Some more work on Arthur detailing the cloth. I used Igor Catto’s method to do the fur on the towel. Click for full size.
The gown I retopo-ed in blender and unwrapped, and used the displacement tool in zbrush with a big tiled fabric texture to get the base, then used the same method as for the towel to add some more noise.
A little texturing and a quick test render (with mid-res geomery ATM, no displacement or anything). As you can see, Arthur’s guide entry at the moment would read “mostly armless” (sorry, couldn’t resist).
And one of Arthur and Marv together:
I checked out your blog and I think this is your best modeling so far I also found some nice eye textures and some other goodies :D. Anyway, the materials on the clothes can use some work as they are not convincing enough and the lighting is overblown ( what are you using vray sun? )
Aargh, I’ve been busy lately, and didn’t have time to post my final entry. I wasn’t happy with the textures, so I rendered out a clay render instead. It was a fun challenge, and I’m pretty happy with the modelling side. Maybe I’ll even get around to doing textures sometime.
Interesting material, can you share it with us? It’s a pity ou didn’t finish in time, but it’s done and looks great
@lbelerique: It’s a really simple material. The cavity effect is done in post using the AO pass as a mask to do some desaturation and altering the hue slightly.
@lbeleriquel: Yeah, I use the Blender to V-Ray exporter Andrey Izrantsev is developing. You can find it here: http://blender.bevice.ru/ The integration into 2.5 is fantastic, no more converting materials, just create your scene for v-ray from the get-go using the materials settings.
Thanks Ben, it really sounds juicy. I have an old sculpt I made of Michelangelo’s David and I want to make a good render with a good renderer, I’m trying in 3DS Max but I want to make some tests in Blender, to check the workflow.
The exporter for Blender looks indeed great
