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Making of Giant Octopus by Damir Martin |
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- Please Give us a brief description about your background and what are you working on currently?
I was always drawn by art and visual expression, but I've started dreaming and "focusing" towards CG back when I was 12 years old and first seen Jurassic park.
In the mean time I started studying art and history of art in whats today called "Academy of applied arts Rijeka", but I never finished it. I never saw myself as art's teacher or classical artist or painter. I always admired computer graphics and animation. 10 years later I bought my first pc and started spending all of my time in front of it. Today, I dont think I would change my calling, it is something that fulfills me and I dont see it as a work, I't s fun and it's something that is always in my head and it's part of who I am.
At the moment I'm a freelancer generalist, but trying to "specialize" only in character design modeling and animation. When i'm not busy doing work for clients who hire me I'm pushing my DinoMonster characters into something recognizable. Currently I work from my home city Rijeka, Croatia. There are some options in store, so I don't know where I might end up in coming months, which is exciting. |
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- How did you come up with this awesome concept?
Goal was to create image that will contain something big and strange versus some historical famous building. Since the image was created to promote Urban Monk studio from Manly, Australia, the building imposed itself to the concept. It was famous Sydney opera house. We soon dug out one nice photo of the building and I started sketching and brainstorming about.
I first started with sort of giant alien creature sitting on top of Sydney opera, but soon enough I abandoned the idea and talking to John, my creative counterpart we came to an idea of giant octopus.
After browsing net for some images of octopus to get some inspiration and idea on how to take it, my first stop was Zbrush where I have created the model that we later composed into the background photography. |
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- What is the workflow that you have followed and the tools/softwares used for your artwork?
You can see the evolution of the model in zbrush. First I had it built from z spheres which are great tool for fast 3d sketching and developing rough forms. After i got basic form of octopus, I proceeded with more detail until it was complete. The problem is however that the topology you get from zspheres isn't allways the best thing about zbrush, and thats the reason the model needed retopologizing. When I do retopo in zbrush, I draw provisional wire on the subdivided model using polypaint technique and only after that I continue with real retopo process. This method allows for some more thought out wireframe and it's better for me as when I used to do retopo without this planing, I would end up with some messy solutions most of the times before.
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- So, what were the next steps once the base model was done in ZBrush?
After I finished retopo, I've exported model to 3ds max to use extrude poly options on its tentacles , and this way I got nicely optimized mesh with nicely aligned tentacle suckers.
Then I reimported low res obj into the zbrush and subdivided it to some 7 mil polygons and used old detailed mesh to project all that details to the new cleaned mesh. I had some more work to tweak tentacle suckers and that was it. After model was completed and cleaned I've painted the texture using polypaint and few custom brushes from my library and that was it. Once again, I exported low res octopus to 3ds max with all belonging maps, such as displacement, normal and color map and put all of that together in 3ds max viewport.I constructed basic rig with max bones, enveloped and skined ocopus mesh and soon enough I was able to pose it just as I wanted it.
- How did come about with the final Composition?
Using the background photo in the viewport background, I posed the model and at that point I rendered out one shot with some basic mental ray lighting and sss material.
The rest of the job was pretty complex and it all happened in photoshop. Using tons of reference images of sea and splashes I composited the big 3d octopus as if it's exiting from beneath the sea surface and beginning to climb on top of the "crab" or "shell" the Sydney Opera House. My psd file consisted of 30+ layers, not to mention that I merged some of them couple of times after painting in some detail or adding some other photos to some parts to get good results.
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We Thank Damir Martin for sharing this tutorial to our CGTantra viewers |
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More works of Damir Martin |
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