Been dabbling with unreal to learn some of the crazy innovations made for the gaming (and now VFX )industry. Took my very own model made for my showreel and tried to compose a scene. 

Mostly the process involved is to use some Megascan assets to make a environment, and create lighting as well as atmospheric effects to add a story to the character. I will add more elements as I learn more. 

Thanks to unreal , I take interests in aspects apart from modelling like effects, Lighting etc. 

 My experiments with 3d modelling took me to some bizarre projects. One of the good acquaintance I made , thanks to my good friend Sanket Khedekar was while I was working at Melting Mints,  Sanket contacted me to know if we could help print a Puppet, for Satyajit Padhye. I grew up watching the puppet shows on Indian television by his father Mr. Ramdas Padhye, an energetic man even at this age and equally curious. They visited the office at Melting Mints to see the process and they were excited about everything. we explored a few possibilities then and moved on with an experimental project. 

 How often do you work on a project that you play with ?  

And then one day Satyajit Showed up  with an exciting project. We were to make a puppet which would resemble actor Aditya Roy Kapur (Kapur  or Kapoor?)  We ideated and started executing,  I wont go into details for obvious reasons, but we basically scanned the actor's face and then I cleaned it up using Zbrush. We directly printed a mold to cut costs and then passed it to vendors for further rubber casting of the mask. 

I added some details like hair that dont get captured in scan , and added some stylization. The final output can be seen in the movie " Ludo " 

I must say Satyajit has done an amazing Job on the final Puppet. The Padhye Family has a very inspiring and rich history of single handedly helping the Indian Ventriloquism and Puppetry Industry. Satyajit is a Star just like the great Ramdas Padhye and you should checkout his live shows to experience his timing and Improvisation.  I am happy to part of such a project and what a feather for my non existing cap. 

            I started this project to learn X-gen in Maya. It was sculpted in Zbrush and I was intrigued by the overall character. I've never played the game but Old men who can fight look cool. Like Mai pei from kill bill and Yamamoto from Bleach anime. 

Do you seethe sword details in the above picture? It was a worked on in a haphazard way, there is a correct way to do this in Zbrush which gives a much cleaner look and edges. However times have changed and now I do such details not in zbrush but in Substance painter(One more reason to keep learning). As I keep expanding my horizons I learn new tricks and faster ways to make things. Below is the example of painting a height map in Painter. 

So I went and made UVs ad took the base meshes in substance just like the sword mesh above and started adding some material details. Here are a few renders with Arnold. And I love B&W renders, Basically just check the Luma channel in render view to see how the values read and then I change materials if required.