First Month of Finals Part 1

No time for much of anything these days. I'm either working on my "professional" website stuff or I'm building my assets and speed sculpting 2-3 things a day. Here's what I have so far.

All of these were done in the first week of class, about 2-5 hours spend on each one depending on the level of complexity .  I tend to give a lot of special attention to the characters I'm more fond of . Eventually somewhere between 3 and 6 of these will be chosen to put on my demo reel.  

All of the speed sculpts are based off someone's concept art and of course real photo reference for the animals. The deer isn't quite finished as I'm filling in some areas and the proportions need adjustments. Three more animals to go, 4 more humans, and 5 fantasy characters for this week. 

No sleep here I come!

-Ana

One-week Character Model

Here's a character I did a few months back. It was a model for a class where we could not use Maya at all and had to use Alternative Programs such as 3ds MAX, zbrush and XSI. I had to sculpt, retopologize, UV, and texture the model in one week(and draw the character sheet). It was extremely rushed, but it's the best I could do in just one week. It's no where near perfect, but it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed seeing a character come together in so little time.

Here is the end result :

And here is the concept art/character sheet I wiped up for her. As you can see, I was inspired by Jessica Rabbit and thus vaguely named her " Gessica" . 

I think she's quite interesting, the design is right up my alley in terms of style, proportions, and colors. So for what it is, i'm quite happy with it. Happy with my grade too :)

-Ana

Side Projects for May-June : Squirrel Robber and 1700's French girl

  Side work I've started in my spare time to prepare for my character modeling art test. The squirrel character I started from Dynamesh ball so it is still in the pre-visualization stages, the proportions are not how I planned so I still need to do more sculpting.

 Specifically I want her to be shorter, and her lower body wider , but not so human which I've accidentally done on this hybrid character. Her bangs and chest hair is separate pieces, I plan to make her shoes separate as well once I retopo it. I usually do a quick poly paint to get an idea of where the character is going and sort of map out where things will be changed.

 

Beginning stages of her face. Eyelids too high up and overall proportions a bit too anime style for this concept.

  This character is an attempt at a certain art style and a take on an older time period. My plans is to make a long dress for her the style of mid to late 1700 apparel(think somewhere between Belle of beauty and the beast and Marie Antoinette) .  Now that I've learned n-cloth, making something like a flowy dress or blouse is pretty simple. I will need to remodel her braid because zbrush separated the geo into small sections. This time I'm going to model the braid facing straight down to be able to rig it and pose it properly. Wire frame is not ideal, more left to retopo (topogun has made my life a lot easier :)

  Taking Visual Development and Motion Capture this month.. very busy and I almost forgot what it's like to have two classes at once. Getting my hands on a new Wacom Intous 4 medium tablet soon as well, a big upgrade for me from the small one.
 
-Ana

WIPS : Shang Tsung, Norman Reedus, and Axl Rose

Here are a few of my more recent WIPS that I thought I'd share. The Shang Tsung is probably the more finished of the three.

"Your soul is mine!"

 I'm probably going to stick his head onto a body because hes just such an awesome character who deserves a full body. Comon, don't tell me you weren't a Mortal Kombat fan at some point. If I didn't have school I'd probably be modeling a ton of Mortal Kombat characters because I'm obsessed with the games and the movies. Yes, the movies too.

 I really want to keep working on this Norman Reedus model. He's one of my favorite actors, I want to eventually turn this into a low poly game character. About 4 hours on this so far.

  

 

Male body study wip

This model was supposed to be Axl Rose serca 1986' but it slowly morphed into someone..much more muscular. I only worked on the upper body so far.

This is just a close up of a texture I was messing around with, it shows more of what I was going for with him. Still needs a proper texture and detailing.

-Ana

3D Self Portrait Bust

 This is the final render of my project from Production Modeling class. This class is focused on making one model of either a car or a Zbrush bust. I played around with Zbrush about two weeks beforehand but this was my first time modelling a high poly bust with texture and hair. I watched some of the tutorials up on digitaltutors.com and that helped tremendously in understanding the program better. I knew the class was focused on zbrush and I didn't want to start without any knowledge of the program. That's not to say I didn't learn a lot in PRM because I did, and it was really great finding something I liked doing so much.

This is a natural expression for me " ..??"

 The teachers were very helpful, and I felt that I grew as an artist in that month more than I had in a couple of classes. The difficult parts of this project was getting the re-topology to work in Zbrush. I had so many headaches each time I made adaptive mesh and had things blowing up and not knowing how to fix them. Retopology in Zbrush isn't their strongest point, it's very hard to move around and draw topology compared to just doing it in Maya or Topogun.

"What are you looking at? I'm bald?? oh... "

 Bust in Zbrush before texture and hair.

The high res mesh wire frame, the low rez is at about 7 thousand points, the one I used for the render was under 50 thousand I believe ;  I now realize was unnecessarily high because the difference in detail between 20 thousand and 50 thousand isn't a whole lot. . In fact a mesh under 10k polys would of worked fine since I discovered using the approximation editor for upping the resolution only while rendering.

 

 The texturing wasn't very difficult, Zbrush made that part easy with the poly paint projection. The hair system was a bit confusing, it takes a lot of tweaking and test renders to see how it looks, and I was never really 100% satisfied with the results. Thankfully I learned more efficient ways of creating hair for next time's character. The rendering took me forever, because I tend to be obsessively nit picky when it comes to my lighting so I kept going back and forth with different angles and lighting set-ups.

Disturbing looking texture map curtsey of Zbrush.

Well that's all for now. I've been working on more bust and full body characters since this, will post WIPS and finished renders soon.

-Ana