Classical ZBrush Sculpt

This is my first proper human anatomy study done in ZBrush. It s based on the Discolobus of Myron - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discobolus - my particular version is closely modeled on a version of the Townley discolobus at the British musuem.
It was created in ZBrush from scratch using ZSpheres as a base. When the sculpting was finished I exported mid sub div level meshes from ZBrush and re-topologised in Maya using quad draw. I then UV unwrapped the retopologised meshes and imported back to ZBrush for projecting the detail. I then baked out displacement, normal and various masking maps.

Texturing was done with a combination of Photoshop and Mudbox, Mudbox was great for painting out seams. Actually in the end I used mudbox for baking the final displacement and normal maps ( so much better than zbrush for that - no seams etc).
I then shaded and rendered the model in Maya using mental ray. Hope ya like.

Final ZBrush sculpt

Timelapse of ZBrush build

Re-topologised mesh in Maya

Final textured and shaded render in Maya

Final textured and shaded render in Maya

Final textured and shaded render in Maya

CG Water FX

I've always been messing about with water stuff in my cg work, so I'm just posting a few vids here with some examples of that. Click on the images below that will link to the videos on vimeo

This is a short underwater sequence I created in Maya. I used the hot ocean deformer for the mesh waves and created a camera with motion to simulate floating. Then added a mia material with water preset and tweaked some of the values. Also added a simple fog for depth. Then comped in After Effects adding particles, DOF, motion blur, light shafts and grain and finally sound.

Created this simple setup to test a water shader and fake caustics. The caustics is a tileable and loopable image sequence created with caustics generator (can create 512x512 sequences free). The water is a mia material with a ocean displacement in the shader group. Did some After Effects jiggery pokery to add some umph.

Created this a couple of years back. Wanted to look at using particle flow in 3DS Max to create a swarm and decided to use fish. Then got carried away and went further with it. The fish is a free turbosquid model. I adjusted the model slightly for animation purposes and also adjusted the texture. All rendered in mental ray and then comped in After Effects to add the light shafts, motion blur etc

Yet more paintings

Here are three paintings done over the last couple of years, I'm putting a bit more info with these as I haven't done so with previous posts. Also I have a couple of work in progress images, they were taken on my phone, so forgive the low quality.

Peter Dinklage - Acrylic and Oil on canvas - 16x12"

(Photo ref: Gavin Bond for TV Guide Magazine)

Work Progression

Sea Painting - Andreas Achenbach Study - Oil on canvas - 16x12"

The Gooch (Colm Cooper) - Kerry Footballer - Acrylic on Canvas - 18x24"

Work Progression

Summer Sketches and Creature Designs

Time to post some 2D work again, I've compiled and composed some pencil sketches done last summer 2014, most of which was located in St Stephens Green in Dublin. I also had some creature sketches in the same sketch book along with a few sketches from the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Enjoy!

Arnold Lighting

First post in quite a while, apologies for the long break. Just wanted to put up some renders of a fruitbowl, which was part of lighting course in Arnold for Maya with tutor John Huikku, really cool dude who's worked at Disney and Weta and now at Brown Bag Films. The model was based on the fruitbowl challenge at 3Drender.com but I adjusted the modelling on most of the fruit and created new UV's and textures (diff, bump, spec) for all fruits except the apple, that's Kevin O Brien's.
Anyway, arnold is awesome, so straightforward as a rendering tool, nothing overly fancy. You can get advanced like any other renderer, but it's very easy to get to grips with, especially the shaders and creates fairly stunning results.

Here's a few renders along with a GIF to show some wip shader adjustment as I went.

Sketchy Work

Here are a few sketches that I have done over the years, some of these stretch back to the early 90's. The Arnie and Jennifer Lawrence sketches are the most recent, just doing a couple of hour long sketches from an Empire magazine.
I was a big fan of Albert Uderzos work for the Asterix and Obelix comics so I used to do a fair bit of copying of his stuff back when I was in school. The rest are random pages from my sketch books. Hope you enjoy.
All presented in no particular order.

Some more paintings

Thought I would post a few more paintings, mixture of old and new. All are acrylic on canvas except for the four lads in the bar, that's an oil on board. Apologies for the poor photo quality on a couple of these, I really need to get a better camera :)

 A painting of banna strand in County Kerry - painted as a 

present for my brother and his wife's wedding.

 A painting of LifeTime Lab in Cork City - painted on 

commission from Cork City Council.

 Four lads in a bar - this was taken from a black and white 

photo from the old Irish tourism board.

Ardfert Cathedral in County Kerry