Here's a color exercise I did in photoshop. It's the portrait of a luchador.My goal on this one was to push colors to their extreme limits, while still be able to watch it for more than 5 seconds straight.
Was lots of fun to do. Next time, I'm aiming for a more dynamic subject with a more elaborated BG. Cheers!

!!!CLICK HERE!!!for high-res version

Here's another take on the metallic paint shader.
It has the sparkling effect this time. Next step will be to put it on something cooler than primitives.A big special thanks to my colleague Nicolas Rous @ Mokko Studio who help me solve the sparkles mystery! (He actually found the solution.) I'd eventually like to implement sprites in the mix, so I'd be able to control sparkle shapes.

As you can see in the exemple, the shader works from far and close range and also with different metal flakes sizes.

software used: Houdini 10 apprentice HD

metallic paint shader v002 from jrgauthier on Vimeo.

This image is the first sketch of project I started for the "B-movie contest" on cgtalk.com. It's been a long time since I did not produce material for that kind of event. The theme just got me hooked.I don't know if the final image will be 2D or 3D yet. I don't even know if I'll have time to produce a final image actually. Time will tell. I'm working on other projects at the same time...Stay tuned!

===HIGH RESOLUTION HERE===

===OFFICIAL CGTALK THREAD===

Here's an experiment I'm doing in Houdini. It's an attempt to make my own Metallic paint shader. It was done for the purpose of learning to build shaders from scratch within Houdini. I'm not totally satisfied with the result, but I think it looks ok. I still feel like I'm missing a really important piece, which is moving sparkles when angle of view changes. This is the next step. Enjoy!

Metallic paint shader from jrgauthier on Vimeo.

Another experiment of mine using Houdini. It's basically some simple L-system generated trees; instanced on a deformed grid. Grid texture details are all procedural displacement shaders. I wanted to create a test animation to check how houdini instances using an random array of objects. In that case I have about 10 variations of the tree and it's picked randomly for each instance. It's super easy to do! I'll definetly use that technique in futur projects.
(Compositing done within houdini as well...)

L-system Instancing from jrgauthier on Vimeo.

This is the link to my new Vimeo channel:
http://www.vimeo.com/user2847970
There is not much in there yet, but I'm planning to move all my website videos to it. The quality is very good, and it allows to download the original, uncompressed, video file source...Sweet!

Another experiment done in Houdini. I experimented with the "for each sop" because I just did a tutorial about it. It's basically a tool letting you create some kind of recursive procedure. In that case, it permitted each copy of the tentacles to have different animation, lenght and shader. All of this is calculated randomly and it allows you to have a global control over the whole thing. (It could also have been done with the "copy sop" in that case). In a future version, I wish to implement collisions and upgrade the shader.

Procedural tentacles animation from jrgauthier on Vimeo.

Zbrush 3.5 just been released so I had to give it a little test drive.
The new tools are really powerful and intuitives. We better get prepared to see alot of pieces similar to this one. Seems like the new tools are dragging you naturally toward the creation of sci-fi/bug/mecanical stuff.
Never the less, much more could be achived with it and it rocks. Thanks to pixologic for another iinnovative(and free) upgrade!

=High Resolution image - Click HERE=

Here's another new drawing of mine.
No cowboy here, it's a cowman! Done with a raw sketchy approach, I'm really happy with the result. I wanted him to look mean and dirty!
If you want to leave comments about it, please do so on the cgtalk forum following this link:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=133&t=783180

click here for High Resolution version

Hi!
Here's another sketch from one my characters: "Le petit Géant".
No ground breaking intentions behind this... just having simple and pure fun drawing!
Hope you like it!

High Resolution version click here