POLYNAUGHT

Horns and chains

Marco Sperling — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:38:50 +0000

The viking is making some progress. Enjoy.

Experimenting with Photofly

Marco Sperling — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:16:13 +0000

Today I had some time to crawl the ZBrushCentral forums and found an interesting little piece of software called Photofly from Autodesk. It offers pretty much one click conversion of photographs into 3d scans. As with all things new I had to mess around with this cloud computing editor – yep, your data is being sent to Autodesk’s server farm where it is gonna be processed… so be careful with what you shoot. Your girlfriend might not appreciate the thought of some stranger’s eyes (US intelligence anyone) enjoying her nudity. Have fun.

Fun with vikings

Marco Sperling — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:06:15 +0000

Long time no post. I promise to post more often.
Here’s some compensation for those of you who still track my blog. This guy is from a personal project of mine that might evolve into a game some day.

Update: a more recent turntable version of this character can be found on my YouTube channel.

A king-sized hug for Chuong

Marco Sperling — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:56:31 +0000

This post with Noah’s mom is mainly for the purpose of showing it to Chuong so I can get some feedback on where to improve and change her. There are still some facial issues to resolve. Her concept scribble was somewhat less defined than the one I got for her son. But I hope you like her so far, Chuong. And do not hesitate to do a paint-over if you feel some parts should be changed drastically.
As with Noah I started with a very clean basemesh that can be found here – saved me quite some time. Of course I will still retopologize her when everything is done.

Edit: A more recent video turntable can be found at my Youtube channel.

Graphics for the starLiGHT ENGINE

Marco Sperling — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:18:33 +0000

In January I joined a small group of C# programmers who are busy converting the XNA based cross-platform starLiGHT ENGINE into an open source project. They aim to support Windows PCs, XBox 360 and Windows 7 Phones. My job is to provide them with graphics for their tests and show-off applications and my first assignment is the creation of 2d assets (sprites) for a Breakout style game.
I plan to utilize both ZBrush and Photoshop to achieve the final look.

Noah grew some hair

Marco Sperling — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 18:06:03 +0000

Over the past few days I tried to find a way to sculpt descent hair and I think the result is okay. It took me a while to find suiting brush and stroke settings but I learned some new things along the way. One of them being that the Make3D button has gone from the Layer sub-palette and you ought to use morph targets and the create difference mesh option now to achieve similar outcomes.
Perhaps I will make a small tutorial in the near future about hair sculpting – mostly to reiterate and internalize the whole process so I won’t forget.
Enjoy the picture below.

ZBrush – Boon and bane

Marco Sperling — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:32:56 +0000

While ZBrush really shines at concept stages of production it always bites me in the rear when it comes to retopologizing the mesh – always! I honestly cannot remember a single project where it “just worked”.The picture below illustrates what I usually get when I reimport a modified basemesh at subdivision level 1. To make things clear – the reimported basemesh did not differ from the original sculpt in those parts depicted at all. Same topology, same vertex positions. And still ZBrush is not able to reproject the sculpt back onto the same topology without vertices and polygons gone astray. One should wonder why this still keeps happening in version 4. If you have got any ideas that’ll help me prevent this error from happening in the future I’d be glad to hear from you.

Noah is shaping up

Marco Sperling — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 14:33:59 +0000

Not much to tell. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Helping a friend

Marco Sperling — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:43:55 +0000

In December I promised a friend of mine to help him with a modeling task for his graduate project. So here are the first two shots of his character Noah – still work in progress of course.
Sadly I did not make it in time to send in my final shots for the Eat 3D Head Sculpting Challenge #2. But I am constantly working on the beast so I can put it in my portfolio. I really want to get rid of those test images.

Back on track

Marco Sperling — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:17:17 +0000

It has been quite some time since my last post. Of course there have been the occasional christmas holidays that kept me busy. But I also had to deal with a sore throat for my part and heating problems/ventilation issues of my Acer Aspire 8930g. It tends to shut down in the middle of GPU and CPU intense operations.
To make things worse I forgot to take my Wacom pen with me when I travelled to Hannover. To sum this up: no progress has been made on my CG entry since 18th of December. A real shame… but now I am back on track.

Update: