Character project I'm working on

So to keep myself busy while job hunting, I built a simple character.

It took a few steps to get there, obviously, so where to start. I wanted to replicate the artist Christopher Zito's style of the kobold creature, so I did a style study to get a feel of how things should move and expressions I should try and hit.

Then I went about doing a character turnaround to try and keep some consistent form, as well as understand what things should look like.

From there it's down to some modeling,

A bit of ZBrush work,

A splash(whole heap) of rigging,

plus a lot of pose testing,

and we get the video at the top. I'm still doing a few tests here and there, but mostly as I go. For now, have this blocking test I'm slowly working on.

Things in Brief

Not much to say for this side of things, as everything I've built is still behind NDAs. However, I can at least show a proper update to the creature Parker

This one is a bit old, but he's been fully modeled out, textured, and primed for rigging. I changed the posture of the model. While I was working, a coworker suggested I pose it out like Pixar did with the bears from Brave, since the bears also went from bipedal to quadrupedal. Hopefully, it will prove easier to setup this way. Still need to work out a few things for this guy, like how the front face's mouth will articulate and how to set up the threading thats supposed to go along the jaw.

Parker update

Just some adjustments to the face region. Wanted to define the divot of the faux jaw up front, as well as adding in the ear. Also got the tail in place with a few spans so it can fold and curl. Add to it a slight modification to the back feet, and some slimming of the shoulder width, and that about sums up the work of the week.

Progress 02-05-2015

Got most of the face roughed out and built the hooves/hands. Need to detail the tail fin area and rework the edge flow along the length of the body.

I've started another personal project

Oh man, haven't used this one in a while. Okay so crazy fast recap right out the gate. Last year wasn't so bad, since I was part of the La Noria short film Carlos Baena on Vimeo.

Did a lot of fixes and rebuilds on the various character rigs, and it was quite the experience.

Moved back to SoCal for work, and that went from August to December, but the commute to and from was rough. Either way, another good experience with working in a pipeline and lots of troubleshooting and revisions. Miss the people there, but not the drive.

And thats it, really. Now the project.

So for a while, I've been meaning to work on a character from the artist Magera Gordon. The character, named Parker, has a strange sort of head.

Now, I've just sort of mulled over how the head would work, and the artist did create a lot of reference stuff on how it functions, but for me, it was more of "how would this function as a character rig?" There's a lot of threading across the mouth, so when he opens it, how does it unravel? With everything being as expressive as they are, how does it affect the stitching and overladen material? Moving down the body, this character is both bipedal and quadrupedal, so how would the limbs rotate to accommodate this change of posture. I could go on about the list of things I want to work out, but that'll be for another time. For now, its just getting the model built with a more standardized body shape.

Thats all for the moment,

Cheers.

Oh cheese and crackers!

I haven't touched this thing in a while, have I? Well today is the day to change that. Let's drop some crazy amount of render updates on the golem from earliest to latest.

Then, lets show how crazy this rig can be:

Having to create a write up for this beast, it totals to about 21 pages, covering all of the controls it has throughout the rig. The file alone sits at near 300mb from all of the ivy, and when I sent it in for testing, a lot of feedback mentioned how overwhelming this rig looked to them. I shouldn't smile so big about that, but at the same time, its just a sign of the level of control I've given them, should they take on the task of animating it.

Small update like stuff

I figured I'd give some updates over here regarding a few of the projects I'm working on. The main one last session was Curpigeon, which for my part, was wrapped up as of Friday last week. I've learned a bit about rigging birds as a result of it, so I get to come away with that. I'm not sure when I'll be allowed to show the setup, so that'll stay in hiding for the time being. If you want to keep up on the progress, go to curpigeon.com and peruse that place few news and such.

Meanwhile, I've done some work regarding the Golem project. I've gotten the body built up to a good place and I'm just about ready to start binding and rigging the beast. Here are some production bits:

Skull piece after being finalized

 

 Rough Body placement

More construction and a test pose, plus some color coordinating

Current standing

 This thing has been crazy to work on, and is only getting crazier as I work out how to do certain things, such as my proposed loose fit stones and the vine growth setup, plus the body construction setup I want to implement, as well as an anchor point for the rig. This doesn't include potential texture work, lighting, animation, and rendering. Still so much to do, but it will be one heck of a piece if I can do this right.

Furi WIP

organic 2 final wip. still needs work, and maybe more of an environment.

Organic 2 mid term

My mid term for my organic 2 class. Zbrush is not a good texturing tool, but it can sculpt something fierce.

So, this blog has been kind of quiet for a few months. Lets fix that.

So these were my final projects for my Organic Modeling 1 class, focusing on using the program Zbrush. Both were built from scratch in Maya, then imported into ZBrush for sculpting.

A bit of both worlds

So I decided to open an old file. Decided to just paint over it rather than render and texture in Maya. I actually like it better this way than trying to second guess the settings over and over, then wait to find that it looks wrong. I kinda like how its looking so far, but I think I might add more to it.

Below shows the current steps to get there.

And one more update, adding some more highlights and adjusted lighting.

Zombie project

Reviving some files from the 10th planet project so I can update my reel. Still have the fly by scene to re render, though I'm going to have to add stuff into it for quality sake.

[edit]

Adding the turn table and short animation done for the project

I figure I'll just leave this here

Worked on this while at Syndrome Studio. Modeled the tv shop, laid out the environment, adjusted some lighting, and animated the geo for the steps in the segment from 1:10 - 1:24.

Website Assets WIP 12052011

Current state of the lab. added the generator off to the left. Still needs a glass pane to cover the orange liquid geo. Tall cylinder contains the turbine fan blades (will show later) that help move the liquid. Trying to thing of a way to infuse the blue lighting points into that section, since blue has become an indicator of the various points of interest.



[edit]


low angle with lighting.

Website Assets WIP

So then, while I continue to find work, I've decided to rebuild my website. From scratch. So below is what I'm going to use for my UI. Figured I needed some practice in my cg work, going from modeling up to rendering.



So this first piece is just the current layout of all the components built thus far. Not much of anything to look at from this angle. The back wall is going to collapse and pull sideways to reveal a large monitor. Thats going to function as my gallery menu. The massive computer terminal will be the demo reel and video menu.




This is going to be the website HUB. The orange panels will link to the different sections of the site, minus two which link out to this blog and my new blog.



[update 06022011]



This is going to be the first thing that the viewer see's once the site loads. Will add some sort of panel that says enter/proceed. Something fancy like.



This will be the links page, or at least that which leads to my friends. Need to add another panel for my personal links, which will be on that space on the right. Also added that pipe with the blue liquid in the background, because lets face it: what lab doesn't have some volatile substance draining from some hidden location into another tank for all to see? Also going to add some kind of indicator bar just above the link screen, as well as some kind of touch panel interface for the window, since it seems a bit empty there.



Just an overhead of what the floor of the tank looks like.



quick and dirty render of the website sign.