LBrush Deformation

Joe Alter [the same guy responsible for the popular 'Shave & A Haircut' plugin] has released new information about his next big thing, LBrush - which seems to be incorporated into their LipService package. Essentially it's corrective sculpting through PSDs [pose-space deformers], but at a subpoly level, allowing you to sculpt in corrective blendshapes much like Mudbox or Zbrush.

Anyway, watch the amazing video above, or visit their website at http://www.lbrush.com/

Paperman - Behind the Scenes

An amazing look behind the visual look of Disney's Paperman short [screened before the upcoming Wreck-it Ralph].

MatCap Baker & Insert MeshMaster for ZBrush

So. Awesome.

Ubisoft lead character artist Joseph Drust has released two new free ZBrush plugins: Insert MeshMaster and MatCap Baker.

Insert MeshMaster speeds up the creation of Insert Mesh brushes by combining settings from the Stroke Panel and Brush Palette.MatCap Baker creates a baked MatCap texture from a UV-ed model [this has been a long long time coming... finally!]

Below are the links for each of the FREE plugins, from the ZBrushCentral forums.

MATCAP BAKER

INSERT MESHMASTER

Mash for Maya

C4D has always been envied for all the motion graphics stuff you can do in it, so this came as a really pleasant surprise.

Mainframe North just released a collection of Maya nodes called MASH - a whole set of tools to create a whole bunch of common motion graphics-like effects.

Best of all.. it's FREE. Go ahead and try it out - you might need to download SOuP Maya nodes too [also FREE!] to make all the functions work.

Here's a LINK to Mash's video examples page, showcasing some of the many things that are possible.

DX11 Shaders in Maya 2013!

It's here!! Autodesk just released Maya 2013 Extension which supports DX11 shaders in the Viewport renderer. Enough talk, look at these videos! [and the realtime pics below]

References for Animators

References are crucial in creating believable animation. Hence these links below have been recommended by several animation schools such as Animation Mentor for having really good and varied selection of references which may prove useful to animators out there. Enjoy!

Fishboy Model updates

Still working on this in whatever free time we can get...

Nadia's initial basemesh, based on our initial concepts and proportions :

Once that was agreed upon, I started roughing out the basic forms...

..and once that was given a greenlight, more details were added in. Still missing all the tertiary details [skinfolds, wrinkles, scales, webbing, etc.] and the resolution is still too low to hold up to close-up shots, so there's still more work to be done. This render was provided to Nadia & Azman to start doing concepts for the clothing and equipment that he carries around.

More to come, hopefully sooner than later. Looking forward to the texturing and shading phase.