Here's some quick renders from XSI, since there aren't any in my original post.

The detail in my normals is coming through nicely, but my textures are definately killing it, so I'll need to rework those. I also need to finish the hair and add some of the other things I had intended, like the hanging bands of cloth and such like that.

So I decided to take a render of fishman into photshop and spice it up a bit, and this is what I came up with. I'm unsure if I'm going to keep it or not. I like the colors I've got going on, I think blues and purples not only seem underwatery but also compliment the colors of fishman pretty well. Part of me wants to put a big green or yellow dot in the center just to balance it though, lol.

Here's two versions, which I've already forgotten the difference between. Hopefully it's apparent.



Which one's better? Leave a comment. I only spent like a half hour in photoshop, so there's plenty of room for improvement... what should I change? I think the lighting right by his head is a little patchy and I should put a little more color over his body, I think it's too obvious that I painted around him.

This is my final demoreel piece, Bugman. He began in a life drawing class where we got to sculpt a creature we made (which was probably the single thing I had been looking forward to the most since my first tour of the school [bo wonder I love Zbrush so much]). So here is my initial concept, and sculpture. The sculpture has a base of wire, covered in tinfoil, and then covered in white sculpy.





I then took him into 3D, but decided to tweak the design. Here is my progress so far in Zbrush:





This is a bottom view (which I only point out because it's a little disorienting without all his limbs in place, lol).




This is his... uhh.... giant ass section I guess. The first view is from the top, then side, then bottom.


Arm.


Leg.


And I forgot to take a screencap of the tail. So this is what I'm currently working on, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I only just discovered the claytubes brush, and could hardly pull myself away. If you're using Zbrush and you're not using the claytubes brush - USE IT. Now. lol. It's extremely useful.

My next character is Warrior Woman. Originally, I had created a demon of sorts, with cracked black skin and lava veins, wings and hair that turned into flames, as you can see below.


It ended up changing into, well, a completely different character altogether. I decided to make a sort of warrior princess, but I wanted to incorporate the skin characteristics of the original version. There is still work to be done for me to feel like I've pulled it off effectively though, so this is WIP of sorts, I guess.








I definately felt better about my face sculpting skills after this, especially since I sculpted the face once, lost the file, and had to redo it. And yes, I realize her eyes are kind of weird. It's a style thing.




Posing took quite a while, not only to figure out, but to actually do the posing. Thank god for transpose. If the transpose tool didn't exist.... well, then I'd have to rig and pose in XSI, and that's... not something I want to do.



Since certain parts of her anatomy are hidden under armor, I didn't worry about them too much. For example, here, from elbow to wrist, her arm has a cover on it, so I only payed special attention to the upper arm and hand.





I textured her body in Zbrush, and her armor in Photoshop. I would post some XSI renders, but I don't have a very good scene setup for her yet. So this'll have to do for now. The detailing that accompanies her texturing was only applied to the T-pose, which I didn't take a screenshot of yet, so the color looks a little flat here.

As you can tell by now, I'm ridiculously creative with naming things. My next piece is the Fountain Statue. Originally, the second half of my Towers environment (The far right side) was going to be a dome, and inside the dome there is a fountain with an angel statue in it. This is my original concept for the statue:
This is my original scene. The fountain was going to have arches on it as well as hanging vines (the green chunks were placeholders).


Her outfit originally included a shawl that was wrapped around her arms.


This was my first real attempt at sculpting a human in Zbrush (after Amazonia, but she didn't really count).


Her original face wasn't that great...at all. The final result wasn't super fantastic either, but it was a huge improvement over this early version.


This is what the final scene layout turned into.



Final posed Zbrush sculpt. I decided that the original pose wasn't very interesting, and that the wings were unnecessary.


Her face is definately a lot better than it was originally, but female faces are very difficult to get right. At one point, her face looked like a 12 year old. That was a scary few minutes.

This i my final render in XSI. I worked quite a while on getting the water right, and considering I'm no render artist, I think it came out pretty good.