Nosferatu, revisited

A year and a half after modeling my Orlok bust, I was given the chance to have it 3D printed.  After a good hard look at the model, I saw it for all its faults (lack of detail in skull shape and face skin, strange mouth, lifeless pose).  Since I needed to add a base that would allow the print to stand, I decided to fix at least some of the glaring issues too before sending it off to the printer.  This is the result:

Nosferatu Bust

This is my latest completed project, a 3D bust of Count Orlok from the 1922 F.W.Murnau film Nosferatu (one of my all-time favorite horror movies, and arguably still the best on-screen adaptation of Dracula to-date).  With the exception of the very low-poly head base mesh I created in 3DS Max, the bust was modeled, textured, and rendered entirely in Zbrush.

 Here are a couple of renders of the high poly model without textures:

One more just for fun:

Head Study: Terry O'Quinn

This is my latest Zbrush project, a head study of Terry O'Quinn AKA John Locke on LOST (or, if you prefer, Howard Hughes in The Rocketeer and the titular character in The Stepfather).  This was my first attempt to precisely capture the likeness of a specific person; overall I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I'm calling it done for now, but I may revisit it at some point to PolyPaint it.

Valkyrie Assault Rifle

Here is another Singularity weapon I modeled based on a Joe Koberstein concept.  If you play the game, pay attention to the fan.  It actually spins up when firing.  Very cool.

Singularity Dethex Launcher

This is one of my favorite assets that I've created at Raven.  It's designed to launch small spheres which expand and become remote-controlled explosives (note the analog-stick-like control on the side handle).  The launcher provided a lot of fun challenges to overcome while modeling due to its complex design.  The original concept and final texture pass were both done by Joe Koberstein.

Weapon X Augmentation

I was really excited to get to create this series of assets for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, not because they were particularly challenging (they were actually pretty simple) but because of their importance.  This tank is where Wolverine had his skeleton covered in indestructible adamantium and received his razor sharp claws, essentially the birth of the character as we know him.

At the time we were working on the Weapon X level, we had no idea how this would look in the film.  I looked to its appearance in X2: X-Men United (as seen during Wolverine's flashback scenes and even more so during his fight with Lady Deathstrike) and tried to recreate it as precisely as possible.  The room was dressed and lit by our environment artists to emulate those flashback scenes as well.  Once we finally received set photos from the Wolverine film we realized they had gone a completely different direction with the look of the room, the tank, pretty much everything.  Rather than scrapping our augmentation room and gear, we simply redressed it slightly and relit it to look more inline with the new film.  The end result was something inbetween the looks of X2 and Wolverine, which worked fine considering our game ended up diverging drastically from the film in many other ways as well.

Prototype Sentinel Hand

Here is another model I did for Wolverine, specifically the Sentinel Labs area.  This was meant to be a skeletal, prototype version of the giant Sentinel hand to be used for weapon testing.  It was based on a concept by Jeff Moy, though I took more liberties with the design of this one than I usually did with his stuff.  As I was setting up these renders I realized that I made this model almost exactly three years ago.