blender

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 :)

hob_acropolis_test01.jpg

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.

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

Chairé,

Martin

April News - the Battle of Marathon is Coming to Life!

Hello there dear followers of the Heroes of Bronze project. Another month of quarantine flew by so fast I haven’t even realized it was May already! Good thing is, I managed to do A LOT of stuff for Heroes, mostly focused around the most important part of the short film - the Battle of Marathon.

If you've been following my Twitter or Instagram, you probably already know about this scene I’ve recently published. It’s in the thick of the fight, directly in the center of the line, where the battle was the most difficult for the Greek army. This is also where Nikephoros and his group are stationed to fight…

You can see Aegeus on the far left, using his spear with the overhand grip, striking over his shield. To the right is Hermogenes, his spear probably broken already, so he is wielding his short xiphos sword. Then there's Nikephoros, holding the onslaught of several Persian soldiers, holding the spear with the more common underhand grip. Most of the enemy infantry is Sparabara, lightly armed infantry, but the one who managed to hack through the shield wall is actually a Persian Immortal. Below him, overwhelmed, is Boter, trying to get back to his feet, while Chalcon on the right is calling to the rest of the line to form up.

It was so much fun to work on this scene, I just love putting together these battle scenes, depicting my favorite moments of Greek history!

In connection with this artwork, I also published a collection of some of the Persian models I used. You can see an Anatolian rider, heavy Persian Immortal and Sparbara infantry with huge wicker shield, and then some lightly armed Saka warriors. The last one is an Egyptian marine archer.

I also worked on other Marathon related environments and scenes, though I don’t want to reveal too much, so just thumbnails now :-)

hob_marathonbriefing_beach_s.jpg

It’s all coming together! Still a long way to go, but I’m getting there, one step at a time!

Oh, and also, to reward my dear Patrons over at Patreon, I decided to make the livestreams I make (which have become somewhat regular now) available in recorded form only to them (Hypaspist and Hoplite tier). However, you can still watch my livestreams live, next one is for example coming on Monday the 4th of May at 8 PM CET :-) Set a reminder here.

Chairé!

Martin

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

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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 :-)

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 :-)

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

Behind the Scenes Articles on BlenderNation!

Hello, friends of Heroes of Bronze! Wonderful news, recently, two articles were published at BlenderNation, where I talk in detail about how I got to working on Heroes of Bronze.

In the first article, I talk a bit about my career, but mostly about what influenced me to start creating Heroes of Bronze, how I approach my projects and generally, what I would recommend for your own projects.

The second article is a Behind the Scenes piece, all about the “Before the Storm” teaser - how I created my assets, how I studied reference, what learned working with Eevee and Blender 2.8 and loads of other info.

Hope you’ll like both of them! It’s my first time being featured like this, so I am very excited about these articles! :-)

Chairé

Martin

New Artwork - "First Blood"

Hello friends, here’s a final version of my newest artwork “First Blood”. It is a cover art for my upcoming Spartan Texturing Course :-)

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Architectural Course Complete + Patreon!

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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