The time of the moondog's finale is at hand! To mentally prepare yourself, forget your preconceived notions of how cold it is in space, how smoke may or may not behave in a zero gravity environment, and the fact that Arizona-esque caves don't exist on the lunar surface. Once you've got your head in that spot - feast your eyes on this comp of Charley and Darbor entering a mystical and shocking moon mine!
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| There's a doings a transpiring at old moon caverns! |
I imagine Darbor shooting blindly into the cave - then walking in to find something so awe-inspiring or horrific that she is stunned and drops Charley's leash as he ducks behind her in a scared Scooby Doo fashion? Maybe that's just in my head movies...For a better look at the dynamic duo, here is an interactive turntable rendered from ZBrush shown using my modified 360 image slider plugin:
No project finale is complete without a bizarre and seemingly arbitrary turntable video, so here we go:
This video turned out to be good practice for me in terms of pushing geometry from ZBrush into Maya - there were tons of ZBrush subtools in these models so I became almost too aquatinted with generated normal, texture and displacement maps in ZBrush. The turntable itself was rendered in Maya using Mental Ray and then everything was put together in After Effects. There is a bit of final gathering flicker in the Maya hair on the model, but it isn't too bad, meh?Last but not least, a quick composition of the various phases of this project, from inspiration, to sketch, to finale ZBrush render:
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| Inspiration, sketches, and ZBrush model... the last step in this vicious cycle is starting all over again! |
Ok, for a full recap of the all the phases of this sculpture checkout my prior three installments:
- Master of the Moondog - Part 1covers the inspiration for this model and showcases my concept drawings
- Master of the Moondog - Part 2 covers the progression of sculpting the Martian bombshell Darbor
- Master of the Moondog - Part 3 shows Darbor's added details and the non-posed version of Charley the moondog
I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out. It was my most complex, in terms of subtools, ZBrush sculpture to date. It was also my first foray into modeling actually human anatomy which itself feels more time consuming than good old monster creation. Maybe that was due to cutting back on caffeine for the last month or so - meaning my typical ZBrush nights spent like this:
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| Send more coffee? Johnny Blaze says "Maybe just one more pot o' joe." Image from Ghost Rider - 2006 Sony Pictures Digital Inc. |
Were spent sleeping, which is likely a tad more healthy? Don't worry, given enough time and lack of motivation I'll surely relapse back to Johnny Blaze levels of coffee drinking. My next project will be modeling Licorice Merlin and beginning the processing of animating the short by the same name. If Licorice Merlin makes no sense, you can read more on the project here.Keep those eyes open for updates....