Cinema 4D

Create photorealistic 3D female portraits with ease with this step-by-step guide from character artist Mao-Lin Liao.Making a realistic female portrait has always been something that was at the top of my to-do list. It's going be a long journey, and doing it properly is always going to require a lot of time and patience. Although this final image is not 100 per centphotorealism, it's a decent attempt.Keep in mind that it's hard to work on something that everyone is so familiar with. The pitfalls of working on a photoreal face are that you can become blinded by your mistakes when spending so many hours on the details. One of the tricks that really helps me is to keep a small mirror at my desk to check any flaws and reset the image in my mind. When you have worked for long periods on a projec...

Digital artist Daniele Scerra reveals how to use Maya and Photoshop to give your ZBrush illustration added impact.Conceptualising a female character can be a really complex task, especially if the base is made by directly sculpting in 3D without having a perfectly defined idea of the final result. I often use ZBrush to make heads, bodies and armour in the sketching phase, modifying the sculpture and the pose as I go along in order to work towards that perfect concept.I particularly like to create different helmets, also using big wigs to give an exotic touch of the sci-fi or fantasy to the character. To add more realism, I try to use as many details as I can in the mesh, and I sometimes work excessively on every detail and the textures. The most important aspect of a scene is, in my eyes, ...

Lead modeller at Framestore Adam Dewhirst explains how to use retopology tools to create a character ready for rigging.Creating a good base mesh is vital if you intend to animate your characters. In the past this would have been done painstakingly, polygon by polygon, in a 3D package like Maya or 3ds Max. However, with the recent addition of retopology tools to sculpting packages like Mudbox and ZBrush, it's become increasingly easier to simply retopologise your concept sculpt as part of the process of its creation.This gives you a complete and usable model in as much time as it took to conceive: the benefits of this are enormous, as modellers need not to be confined by lack of technical skill and can be free to sculpt in a creative and limitless way.Here, I'll walk through ...

Artist Jose Rodriguez channels his influences and experience to create an incredible character.Click image to enlargeThis 3D art project, called Heavy Knight, was based on a character design concept of an elite heavy knight for the universe of Twilight Monk by Trent Kaniuga. Senior character artist Jose Rodriguez spent six months on and off working on the render between freelance projects. The base was created in 3ds Max with V-Ray and then ZBrush was used to create all details for the displacement maps.While Rodriguez says he works in a very traditional way, he often experiments, mixing techniques in 3ds Max and ZBrush to create hard surfaces for his props. Overall the artist says there are two areas to his work he particularly enjoys: "I love sculpting the high-resolu...

Digital artist Jonathan Reilly details his workflow for creating an authentic and terrifying dinosaur model.Creating a realistic creature, particularly one that no longer exists like this dinosaur, requires reference and preparation. Usually, when I create a monster, my imagination is allowed to run free.For this project, the creature actually existed so I have spent a lot of time building a library of reference to base my dinosaur on actual anatomy and make it as realistic as possible. For me, the T-rex is iconic so when I was asked to do a cover piece, there was no question which dinosaur I should choose. In this training we look at the workflow I used to create it.01. Set up the scene in MayaFor a project such as this, reference is keyChoose a side view reference image of a dinosaur. Br...