I decided to post an article about Persian CG artists and their works and I decided to start with one of our friends and colleagues, Ali Chenari, and give you a glimpse of some of his work on CGPortfolio where you can see some of his characters which are very unique.

Artemis Giraffe

Ali Chenari is a director and creative artist who also directed our short movie “Baran” and is currently working on improving and increasing his portfolio.

Head over to CGSociety to see a great modeling and shading tutorial by Jeff Miller. Although the tutorial doesn’t get into all details it is still extremely educational and fun and shows us just how a professional like him works and produces his works of art; and art it is! Just observe the level of attention to detail and the artistic vision that has gone into this piece and you’ll understand why the tutorial is so simple and easy to follow.

It’s like watching a champion skater gliding on the ice and the feeling we get that we can do exactly the same thing. Well kids, don’t try this at home!!

Just kidding, but you’ll need a lot of experience and creative juices to make such a character and all of that in 1 WEEK!!! Just goes to show all of us how fast we should be able to work.

This is our latest Persian Warrior character in a series of four. Ghobad is the leader of the group and what he lacks in strength and brute force compared to the other warriors he makes up for it using his cunning wits and his excellent marksmanship.

Ghobad model 01

The model is done by Reza Ramezani using Zbrush 3.1, based on a concept by Faraz Shanyar and it has taken about 36 hours so far for the model alone. We still haven’t moved to Zbrush 3.5 yet but with all the fabulous features it has, we won’t be resisting long. For those of you interested you can read more about some of its greatest features such as Zspheres II and Zsketch on the pixologic website.

Gobad model 02

We will post the shaded and rendered model in future posts on our blog as well as on our CG Portfolio page.

This is another one of the characters in a series of 4 game characters we are currently working on and is named Armin. Armin is a powerful and fierce warrior but contrary to his looks has a heart of gold. His main weapon is a pair of huge flanged maces which he uses expertly to clobber his assailants and enemies.

The sketches and concepts were created by Faraz Shanyar.

The 3d model is being done by Reza Ramezani, one of our lead modelers and is done using ZBrush 3.1 and Max 2009.

Armin character sketches and concepts

Armin preliminary sketch 01	Armin preliminary sketch 02	Kam final sketch 01	Armin final sketch 02
Armin modelsheet

This is a preview of the final mesh with and without some accessories:

Armin 3d model 01	Armin 3d model 02
Armin 3d model 02

The model was done in 9 working days using ZBrush 3.1 and Max 2009 and is currently in the shading process. We will post updates on this model as they become available.

This is one of the characters in a series of 4 game characters we are currently working on. The sketches and concepts were created by Faraz Shanyar.

The 3d model is being done by Bahram Najand, one of our lead modelers and is done using ZBrush 3.1 and Max 2009.

Kam character sketches and concepts

Kam preliminary sketch 01	Kam preliminary sketch 02	Kam final sketch 01	Kam final sketch 02
Kam modelsheet

This is a preview of the final mesh with and without some accessories:

Kaam 3d model 01	Kaam 3d model 02
Kaam 3d model 02

The model was done in 8 days using ZBrush 3.1 and Max 2009 and is currently in the shading process. We will post updates on this model as they become available.

Aladdin and the Princess riding on the Ghoul’s back

The Aladdin and the Ghoul 3d models are ready and just need to be posed for this image. Since it would take too long to rig and envelope these characters we have decided to use ZBrush to set their poses and then import them into Vue 7 XStream. We’ll give you more updates on our process and the results in the future. Thanks for staying with us.

Hair 3d wolf

This is the first model that was worked on in our hairy animals production tests. The character was modeled in XSI and ZBrush by Reza Ramezani.

The hair was also worked by Reza Ramezani using XSI hair. Texturing was done using ZBrush and Photoshop.

You can see some more snapshots and renders in the galleries sections. The render is done in XSI 6.5 using Mental Ray and takes a LOT of time.

I even made a test render on a quad CPU with 4 Gigs of RAM and a 64 bit XSI but it still took very long. I’m not sure but it seemed as if hair in XSI 6.5 doesn’t use any of the 64 bit capabilities of the application. Most of the passes rendered very quickly on this system but the hair pass took almost as long as the tests on other 32 bit systems. This is one point I’m going to investigate further but if anyone has any suggestions they would be very welcome.

We are currently working on the rigging and animation and will post some updates soon.

Hairy Gorilla concept

This character was also created by Reza Ramezani who did the modeling, hair and textures using Hamed Kamali’s concept designs. The modeling was done in XSI and ZBrush, texturing was also done in ZBrush

Gorilla in a T stance

We are currently working on the shading in order to fine-tune some small issues and in the near future we will possible start rigging and animating this lovely gorilla, so stay tuned.

This is Roshanak’s mother in 3D and she was created in XSI by Reza Ramezani

This is a model done by Mohammad Modaress in Max. It was imported into XSI using Crosswalk 2.0.

We couldn’t import using .obj format because it automatically turned some polygons into triangles and four-sided polys, but using Crosswalk solved this problem.
Another problem we faced with crosswalk was that some of the objects would move in space even if we froze their histories before the import process.

Maybe this has been solved in newer versions of Crosswalk.

You can see some of Modaress’s work on CGTalk