iguana iguana

have not posted anything in the finished section for a while, so here is my latest work, a portrait of an iguana iguana. sculpting in blender, details and textures in zbrush, rendered in cycles, composing in photoshop. i hope you enjoy (crosspost with sketchbook)


Wow! I love the detail, your sculpting abilities are well known, but never cease to amaze me!

I think the material is a little bit on the “ceramic” side, but the overall render is great!

Well done! :slight_smile:

OMG, another image for top row, incredible Doris, I like a lot the materials, super inspiring work!

congrats!

-José

Very nice sculpting and texturing, I like it a lot. However, the arm should be longer than that, and the hand considerably bigger. I lived with one of these for years, so you can trust my advice. =)

WOW… how did I miss this, I love when you bring color into the mix Doris. Such a great job on this one.

thank you bernardo for flattering words :slight_smile: …yes, the material is not most realistic, i liked the shiny so much that i decided to keep it :slight_smile:
thank you joseperez, i am very happy when my work does inspire!
owldude, yes, i believe you! wow, you lived with an iguana, amazing! next time, i make better arm and hand :slight_smile: thank you for advise!
hey harley, you did not missed it, i just posted it today… yes a rare color piece, i am always unsure when using color, too much sculptor in me…lol…thanks you!

Nice ceramic iguana.

Really good - maybe the shader is a bit ceramic but I don’t think it matters, I love the presentation and the colours. I actually tried something similar before - and sculpting the big scales is fun but the small ones impossibly boring. Surely you didn’t sculpt all those tiny scales? Was it done with an alpha brush or something?

Great Mr. Iguana! :wink: I like the presentation a lot, the graded light in the background draws the viewer in to the Iguana’s face first. The whole composition on the diagonal is a lot more interesting than a horizontal version would have been. Good job!

p.s. agree about the material, depending on what your intentions are. More SSS and tone down the gloss if you want more “realistic”? Otherwise it works well for the presentation.

Amazing Doris! Does your work take you a lot of time?
Greetings

dr. caballo, thanks.
swmo, thank you. yes, you are right the tiny scales are sculpted with and alpha brush.
matt, thank you for the idea of name :slight_smile: … yes you are good composition teacher :slight_smile: i actually redid the composition, after i thought it is “finished”, but then saw it does not work properly… the shader has no sss, yes when i began building the shader i aimed at realistic, but then came up this glossy version, ceramic is certainly a good description, adn i liked it so much, that i decided to go with that. an illustration type of presentation not neccessarily needs a realistic shader, i thought…
hetors, thank you. well, what is a lot of time? it did not feel like a lot, since i loved working it. but to be more precise, i was doing it in a week, working every day about 5 hours on it, so about 35 hours in it. a lot? i don’t think so :wink: i did several that took much more…

edit
matt, you might be interested in that this one did not render on gpu, as it needed more than 2 gb to render, since the main texture is huge! and the others are not small either…

Simply amazing!!!
Did you rig this baby?

thank you jedi_duck, no he is not rigged, just sculpted into pose…

I love textures and details, amazing work

It is a lot work effort, and as always good job. You deserved five star !! :wink:

thank you rrtk :slight_smile:
thank you for the stars, 3dlslider, very appreciated :slight_smile:

Oh I don’t know about that, I’m just repeating in my own words things that I have read elsewhere :wink: Either way, the attention paid to the composition here paid off. You know it’s good when the thumbnail looks great (I think you said that actually, see! Just repeating ;)) I think looking at the thumbnail is kind of the equivalent of when painting how you may squint to blur the image so you can see the blocks, shapes, colours and interplay between all of those.

I suspected that the shader was deliberate, and you’re right, it does work well. It’s always a bit of a battle in rendering art (as opposed to “traditional” media) because people have very different expectations of how things should look. There’s a strong emphasis on realism, which is not necessarily a good thing. It often seems like you have to go very strongly non-realistic, or very very realistic, since everything in between will get criticised for not being one or the other. It’s not a problem that plagues painters! It takes a determined mind to choose what you really want and avoid the external pressures that may not be in your best interests. :slight_smile:

hey harley, you did not missed it, i just posted it today… yes a rare color piece, i am always unsure when using color, too much sculptor in me.

You should not hesitate using color in anyway you choose, every time I have seen you use it, it has come out wonderful. I hope you’ll use it more in your projects, when the feeling arises.

Amazing work Doris!
I am impressed with the surface of the Iguana! I am thinking of sculpting a dinosaur. I wonder how did you get such a texture on the skin surface like that. Any special alpha and brush you would recommend?

(by texture I mean mainly for the sculpting texture, but the color texture is awesome as well :slight_smile: )

yes, matt, i said that with the icon, but you know, you made me think more about composition. and that i am grateful for :slight_smile:
thank you harleynut for the encouragement.
thank you kfir… the larger scales were all sculpted with the claystrips brush, one by one, and the crease brush. to ccreate the tiny scales, use a texture in the brush slot, clay or claystrips brush,and the texture i took from a foto of scales of an iguana. the texture is set to stencil mode, the stroke type of the brush to anchored and from edge to edge checked. then place, scale and rotate the stencil as needed over your model and make a stroke to apply this. you need play with the strength setting of the brush to get the wished effect.
larger scales, i would always do by hand, or at least first pass by using the stencil method, and then second pass cleaning up by hand… i did actually do some clean up work on the small scales too, as the overlapping of the stencils produced some unwanted effects. but this was easy to do…