Demoreel 2022

Hi guys!

With great excitement I want to present my first Demo, which I did in PIXL VISN Digital Media Arts Academy. Choosing a new career path and visiting a school again really was a wonderful and tense experience. 

Augustus Di Prima Porta

As a freak for arts and history of art I decided to start with a classic antique masterpiece to learn from the old greek and roman sculpting schools for my first project and drawing inspiration from their techniques and styles.

Especially this very statue remarks a turning point in roman sculpting history, since it relays itself on the idealistic greek school for the first time and merges it with the roman more realistic style. 

In this project the use of reference was highly important. The statue is a famous piece of history, so there was a lot to find online, but I also had the opportunity to visit it in the Vatikan Museum and examen it in person. 

With this project, my goal was to immerse myself in ZBrush. Starting from scratch with a simple sphere and working my way up to a forty million polygon model, which took me several months in this one program was a great experience.

In this process I learned about the limits and mechanics of dynameshing, the advantages of multiple subdivision layers, all kinds of different brushes, rigging inside of Zbrush and much more. I also found out a lot about anatomy and posing, when there is the right moment to change from v-pose to the actual pose of the art piece.

The textures I created in Substance Painter. I wanted to gain an old and little bit of run down finish, with breaks and scratches.

I rendered with Arnold in Maya in the colorspace of Aces and did compositing in Nuke. 

The Ninja

For my second project, I drew inspiration from an old C64 game called 'Last Ninja'. I aimed to recreate the iconic character from the game as a realistic depiction. Due to the limited time available for the second project, and my desire to sculpt a human character, I utilized the head from my first project as a base. 

For further reference i used pictures of Toshiro Mifune, an old and famous actor. I did not want to copy him, but just use his pictures for direction. I also gathered some stills of an old tv series called 'Shogun' which I loved. My goal was to let him look more traditional, not so much fantasy comic art style like you would usually find them in pop art. 

After lost too much time on the Augustus project, I only had three weeks left for this one. So my idea was to take the Augustus sculpt and transform it to an asiatic looking face. For the skin details I took some scans I found online. Also interesting for me was the grooming part, which I did in Maya, with XGen. The textures for the suit, which I also sculpted in Zbrush, where made in Substance Painter.

Lighting, lookdev and compositing was done by the incredible Dominik Benz, a classmate of mine. 

This project and visiting Pixl Visn was an incredible learning experience for me, as it introduced me to so many new elements and interesting and talented people. I am truly grateful for the knowledge I have gained throughout this process, and it has ignited a strong desire within me to continue learning and improving my skills. I am excited about the future and all the opportunities that lie ahead for me to grow even further.