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.

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.

reference pieces for SPRG MKII

Artists Renditions