Ashe Daniel | ESMA Student | CG projects 2023

I was intent on practicing surface detailing, but in order to save time and meet the deadline I isolated it to the areas in which the coat (the hair that covers the whole body of a horse) was shortest. This gave me further flexibility to change my framing. While the end result was subtle, I really value the variation it brings to the final image.

All details were hand sculpted with the help of a few skin and wrinkle textures I found online. The end result was a combination of human forehead and neck alphas!

aka Paleosuchus Palpebrosus or more commonly known as a Dwarf Caiman.

(Technically he's an alligator but alligator doesn't rhyme with rock... so..)

This was another project done for my coursework at ESMA. The aim here was to discover the whole pipeline from conceptualization to final output of an organic creature. As usual, we used Maya and RENDERMAN for lighting and shading, but we were given free rein for use of texture painting and sculpting softwares. I chose to use Zbrush and Mari.

We were set with a limitation of a small creature, and as my personal goal was to execute complex displacement I went with a juvenile alligator.

The process for this project was very similar to my horse. I followed the same logic for making my base mesh as before - the challenge for this, however, was the frequency and detail of the displacement. I incorporated alphas from texturing XYZ, scale brushes, and ALOT of hand sculpting details.

Tackling the level of detail on a reptile was not necessarily within the scope of the course but I'm glad I went through with it. The deadline forced me to evaluate where I needed to focus my efforts the most and find creative solutions to produce quick turnarounds.

After a few weeks straight of sculpting scales and many mugs of coffee later - I exported some maps out of Zbrush itself to use as masks. I used Mari's nodal system to create a procedural base and pushed it further by hand painting over it. Following this, I spent some time going back and forth between shading and painting textures to achieve this look.

(Finding high-quality references of alligators bathing in the sun was key to my shading process, I'd scrolled through hundred of wildlife photographers by the end of this project )

No goofy name here. Just Khaleesi.

This was a personal project I started over the summer of 2022 but had to continue in the Winter of 2023. It was the one I've spent the most time working on back and forth between school projects and classes.

Game Of Thrones and its sequels have been a major inspiration to me as an artist and just a human being, for about a decade now. The scope of the show and its universe on television blew my mind as a teenager. Having ended up in the same industry that brought it to life, I decided to pay homage (while training my sculpting muscles of course)

Capturing the likeness of an individual is one of the hardest things to do I've found. Especially when actors, just like the rest of us, change a lot over time. Age, weight, climate, and lighting make it near impossible to capture the intricacies of the human face. Let alone someone in the public eye! that's millions of people that could possibly clock your mistake ;-;  anyway...

In the absence of Emilia Clarke in my city to grab references in a studio setting XD - I had to settle for screenshots and red-carpet photographs. Hordes of reference photos from every angle were key to capturing the forms of her face.
I often got lost in what I thought her face looked like and found myself having to forcibly refer to my PureRef boards to keep the sculpt as accurate as possible.

The entire sculpt was done in Zbrush - as per usual, and her pore detail was a mix of multiple skin alphas and hand sculpting on top of them. I used a methodology of adding surface detail in layers (Base, Secondary and Tertiary) from a few peers and am very satisfied with the results.

For grooming, I used solely X-gen core to create very a very basic output that would bring the likeness together.