Jade Leaf Studio

I received a suggestion for a Kitsune Statue a number of years ago and only just got around to making one. As soon as it was suggested I had wanted to create one but never really got around to doing so. I based it's appearance on a number of existing shrine fox statues in Japan. It's also already on version 2 so you can imagine how long I was sitting on it without bothering to make a marketplace listing.

Remember this one? No right? It's a dust-covered dragon that hasn't gotten too much love since it was first created. My question was, how to update it without losing it's original look? I played around with it a little until I got a stylized result that I liked. The original subject material was made out of copper, so I tried to reflect that with it's new default texture set. I also included a stone version to honer the original.

Dragon X is now version 3! With smoother geometry and a complete beard, it looks more like the subject material that first inspired it. It has better normal maps and nicer textures, as well as a few other Oriental-themed material sets, Jade and Gold! I wanted so bad to make it Jade when I was first sculpting it, but I had no idea how to design my own substance materials back then. I also didn't know how mirror mesh models without flipping the normals, turning the model inside-out, and causing upload errors so only the sculpted version was mirrored. Now I can safely upload mirrored mesh models and Dragon X was the first thing I updated with that. Cheers to mirrors, and substance-material authoring.

This remake was one of the first examples of something I really tried to hand-sculpt the detail on. It's not too bad for a first-ish attempt. The gargoyle was one of my first statues and I wanted to give it a modern makeover. I can't believe it's already been about 3 months since I actually completed it, but left it sitting around in my inventory along with some of the other updates. Being too busy to actually take pictures for the marketplace and update the listing? Ayuki please..

Back when I first made the cobra, I didn't know how to use any other sculpted primitive type besides 32x32. So I couldn't make a long body like what's possible with a 16x64 and as a result, it's body was split into multiple sections. That has always bugged me. I decided to rework it next knowing it was simple enough that it wouldn't take me longer then a couple days to do. I gave it a base to sit on and textured it with a golden material that I came up with after combining a few different substances together for some depth. End result = SHINY! The idea to make a gold one came from Ancient Egyptian themed statues and artifacts.  

There wasn't any particular reason why I decided to update this one when I did, I planned to update everything and was picking random statues to to practice on. Practicing brushstrokes for adding folds to cloth were the main focus of this update so I can get a little better at it for when I do the angels. This was also done when I was starting to experiment with Substance Painter a little more. It gets it's metallic look from experimenting with Smart Materials in Substance.

Well, I almost forgot about this blog! Just as I was returning to Second Life last year, First Life had to go and get a little crazy. I ended up with a full-time job, involved with sudden family developments and finding myself with little to no time for the computer in general. Shocker right? Although sometimes on weekends I do find myself playing around in zbrush for an hour or two if I'm in the mood to have a little bit of sculpting fun. I haven't forgotten about my plans to update my store while developing my mesh skills enough to switch to full-mesh works at some point. Over the past few months I've been reworking a handful of my sculpts, picking statues at random to play around with for a couple of hours each weekend. I've been fine-tuning my texturing, as well as normal detailing. As I was working with the Gargoyle remake, I finally had the thought to get rid of prim eyes and do them solely with normal maps. I also tried this with the Kitsune but it needs a lot ...