September News! Acropolis, Tutorials and Livestream Collection Discount :-)

Whoa, the summer has flown by already and already September is here. Fortunately, I used the last two months to work on Heroes of Bronze as much as possible. Mostly, I finished up my Character Creator - IClone - Blender pipeline, with animations, facial performance and better looking shaders. I took the opportunity to introduce an exciting tool that came out recently for Character Creator - the SkinGen plugin, making automated skin texturing a real joy!

Connected to that topic, I also made a free tutorial where I explored how you can create your own clothing simulation directly in Blender, without any external tools.

Finally, my work on the ancient Acropolis of Athens, ca 500 BC, is coming together.  It is a slightly different city than most of us probably know from the time of Pericles. At around 500 BC it lacked both Parthenon, the magnificent statue of Athena, Propylae and other famous structures. These would only be built after the wars with the Persians. Instead, the Acropolis offered a view of two older doric temples. Still, even then it must have been a magnificent sight...

This still a wip model I was able to put together from my architectural assets and a bit of KitBash 3D. I used Cycles for rendering, Megascans and Grasswald for vegetation and World Creator for some background terrain generation :)

Last but not least, I was able to put together the first 10 livestreams, edit and polish them and put together into this Gumroad package. It is 10 hours of content, detailing my workflows, tips and tricks, Blender, Substance Painter, Photoshop and Character Creator pipeline. Just for you, followers of the blog, you can now get it 50% off with the coupon code: “hoblivestreams110” :-)

Also, as a small teaser, have a look at this image - and know that soon, I will do a tutorial on how I made the beard and hair for this character in Blender.

Enjoy the rest of the hot summer days, my friends!

Chairé,

Martin

February News - new experiments, building scenes, finishing courses...

Hello everybody,

Good news! After I’ve finished two of my courses lately I’ve been working on these past few months, I am speeding up the production of my project. First of these courses is of course the Substance Painter Launch Pad for CGBoost.com, which is now complete, and a perfect start for your Substance journey. You can read the reviews, if you’re interested :-)

The other course is free and it’s this one. Go ahead, try it:

Other than that, I have of course been working on new models and scenes! A lot of experimentation is going on, lately, for example, I tried again the awesome Waterial shader in combination with the Ocean modifier in Blender, to create some stormy seas in this artwork. Now all I need is to figure out the splashes, because now they’re done in postproduction, and also the rain. Soo… that’s next :-)

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I have also been quite busy finishing the main characters. After Penelope, I worked a lot on NIkephoros as well as Alkaios, trying to push the look of their faces as much as possible. For that, I used this Realistic eye pack by Jim Morren and Eyebrow pack by Nazar Noschenko. These really helped me improve the models! These are still work in progress, but what do you think? Leave a comment below :-)

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Chairé!

Martin

New Course! Making a Short Film Teaser using Blender Eevee

I just released a new course on my Gumroad - "Making a Short Film Teaser Using Blender Eevee" where I go behind the scenes of my latest Heroes of Bronze teaser, made in Eevee.

More than 100 minutes of Eevee, Blender, Substance Painter and After Effects project breakdowns.

Topics covered:

- How I assembled scenes from the teaser using Blender 2.8 Eevee

- How to light your Eevee scenes and add atmosphere

- How to render from Eevee for easy compositing

- How to create 3D and 2D soldiers for your armies

- How to add image skies and use HDR images to light realtime scenes

- How to simulate particles and bake cloth sims

- Adding Megascans to your scenes

and more...

WATCH CHAPTER 1 FOR FREE:

WARNING: These are NOT step by step tutorials, rather breakdown videos, summarizing the workflow I used to create the "Before the Storm" teaser...

Also, some historical fun facts about Ancient Greece are of course a must :-)

Chairé,

Martin

Architectural Course Complete + Patreon!

Hello friends!

With the Part 9 - Simulation and Rendering, my Blender and Substance Painter beginner course that I've been making for quite some time now is finally complete! There are nine parts, almost 3 hours of free content, that focus on all the important aspects of my asset’s creation.

Part 1 takes you through the modelling process of the ancient Greek pedestal
Part 2 introduces you to working with particles
Part 3 shows you the sculpting process inside of Blender
Part 4 focuses on basic UVing and texturing inside of Blender
Parts 5 - 7 shows you how to import your model to SubstancePainter and create several Smart Materials
Part 8 shows how to plug in your Substance painter textures and light your model
Part 9 introduces some more particle and simulation work (smoke and embers) and also the rendering setup

You can find the playlist with all the parts here.

Also, I am trying something new! So, if you want to support the project, you can do so by having a look at my Patreon intro video below.. or go directly to this new Patreon page :-)

Chaíre!

Martin