I'm back!

The end of last semester which was quite busy: a short TV commercial, a script(which i'll be going over in details later), and another modeling project due; and after 3 weeks holidays spent doing mostly nothing/being sick(that's how they're meant to be...); the new semester is starting today, already full on but again more on that later.

I should have upload this last week so it would have marked the end of the 1st semester but today is just as fine :P.

So, this is my last modeling assessment: we were asked to design a monster. We could based our design on existing creatures but had to twist them to make them our own. I really wanted to try something different for this assessment, so i changed a bit(just a bit) the style to come up with something a bit more realistic(even though the end result still look a lot cartoony from my point of view). The first idea i had in mind was some kind of werewolf with wings and then as i was sketching i came up with a fat dog with skinny arms and wings:

(which came out rotated for some reasons oO)

I came up with the character model sheet afterwards, not as nice as the previous ones though: the lines don't match up, i had to change the shape of the body a bit to get a better model. Also didn't get the time to align them properly in one file:

The character poses and textures were the last thing I did(even after modeling and texturing), I knew already the poses I wanted it to have it pretty much from the sketching phase:

(Could be better but good enough for their purpose)

Then came the final picture including a simple background:

First time doing it all in photoshop, I definitely like sketching on paper first better. It turned out alright, one ear is missing though.

Moving on to the 3d:

Final render(white BG because of the Alpha)

I used SSS-Shader for the skin, a couple of Area lights specially for the wings. The modeling itself wasn't too hard. I quite enjoyed modeling the face and "sculpting" the muscles. UV Mapping was easier than the other models I've done so far and came out clearer. I've still got issues with hands modeling. A simple rig to pose the model, the deformations were ok except for the legs but you can't see it too much and that's about it for 3D.

Then imported to photoshop:

You can see how much the picture has changed since the Final Render from Maya. I've used a couple of ambient occlusion layers(AO ftw!). The shadow and reflection passes didn't came out well unfortunately so I wasn't able to use them to the fullest. I added a simple background made out of a couple of random textures and done! It might be a bit too much of photoshop for the end product, but I still like it.

Overall, the model as its own defaults(mostly around the hands and where the body doesn't deform well); the head came out pretty much as I wanted, same goes for the wings. I could have come up with a better background but I wouldn't want to use a random picture from the net and I didn't have time to model a proper one(which would have been some kind of ruins I think).

That concludes my last modeling assessment for the year. We'll still be having modeling next semester but it will be part of a much bigger project. Project that I will be talking about in the next post!

Character Model Sheet: Robot

Almost a month since my last post, about time to add something new :).

I've been working on this for the last couple of weeks, it's part of one of my first assessments this semester. It consists in designing a robot and make it in 3d while trying to stay as close to the design as possible.

I tried to design a cute robot for this one but as I started to add details, the head wouldn't match with the body anymore. So after a huge amount of drawings and a lot of inspiration from this :P, I got to this point:

Lined up in Flash and trace off all nice and clean hehehe:

HYDRAULIX is the name of the fake company given to us in the assessment brief.

It's low-rez ,doesn't have any highlights or shadow and the perspective is a bit off on the front view but there is the basic shape of the model+the colors. This is more than enough to take it to the next step: 3D modelling.

I've already started modelling(using Maya this year, so far I like it better than 3ds Max) but more on that next time!