So this is my second ZBrush model, and the final model for my class. I've spent an inordinate amount of time on this one, but it's going to be shown to Blizzard Entertainment, so I think it's worth the investment.
We're supposed to bring these models with us on a field trip to the Blizz studios in January some time, so I'm excited and nervous to show off my work to the big studio folks!
Final sound assignment from sound class. We were told to find a film clip and replace all the audio with whatever we wanted. I decided to replace it with sound from Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past.
Lots of fun, and the teacher said this was one of the better assignments he'd seen among those of us who did video-game-themed sound clips.
Actually decided to add some lighting this time since we were focused on this assignment for a good while.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently, we had some health issues for a couple weeks there, and since then my life has all been spent playing catch up. This blog should basically explode with posts in the near future, so be prepared.
So a few weeks ago, and friend challenged me to model Bahamut from Final Fantasy X. I took him up on his challenge with the caveat that I didn't actually want to just model someone else's character. Instead I just took Bahamut as a source of inspiration and ran with a normal dragon still within that sort of anatomy.
This is the result:
1200 polys
2048x2048 texture
(pretty sure I can shrink that if I wanted to use this anywhere)
So I'm taking a ZBrush class to learn some digital sculpting.
For our first project, the teacher had us take a stock model offered by ZBrush and just play around with it. I took a stock human model and kind of accentuated some muscle structures and made his face look like a Star Trek villain or something.
Basically, I didn't do a whole lot of work here other than trying to make the edges nice and crisp, because I've heard that hard surfaces are difficult to do.
For my next trick, I'm modelling a giant, sentient tree!
CG Animation assignment from my teacher. He told us to do a ninja jumping from one platform to the next. I decided to do something based on The Next Karate Kid.
My teacher doesn't like the pose I started with, he urged me to do something more action-y, but I decided to leave it as it is despite his preference. Hopefully you guys are on my side, as I think it works just fine.
Ignore the headband for now, I might go in and animate it later if I decide I want this shot in my portfolio.
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Previous blog post animation, revisited with tips from my fantastic 3D Animation II teacher!
The next comes in two parts that I didn't previously post. I did the following in a few hours between classes as practice:
The only issue is that the animation is sloppy and awkward. Which is ok, given that this is uncleaned animation. Unfortunately, I went through to clean this up and I apparently screwed something at a very fundamental level and was unable to resolve the problem easily.
So instead of bash my head against the wall trying to fix it, I restarted it, beginning with the run cycle:
Throughout the rest of this week, I intend to rework the rest of the animation as well, bringing it up to a level that I'm happy with.
Second week's assignment for CG Animation. He wanted us to do a ball bouncing with some form of personality, so I decided to make an out of shape ball.
Figured I should post these things now that I have a small pile of them. These are hats available for download in the Steam Workshop for Worms Clan Wars. All were made by me. All have been good practice for modelling, both low AND high-poly, as well as normal baking, something I had no experience with before.
So Nintendo is running a fanart competition. The top 5 winners will get a Wii U + Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD bundle, and will have their artwork on display at the Seattle performance of the Symphony of the Goddesses, both in the lobby and behind the Orchestra on stage.
I. MUST. WIN!
Apparently, blogger limits the display size. Full resolution version available here:
So it's the end of summer and I've spent my time practicing modeling and texturing. Well I figured now is about the time for me to do a progress report to see how far I've come since May when school let out, and I first started doing texture painting.
Well thanks to the fine folks over at the Polycount Forum providing me with much material to study and become intimidated by, I feel I've progressed quite a bit. And this is what I have as evidence for that thought:
Chibi self portrait, if I were a video game character in an MMO with the ability to design my own class. The design is supposed to be a sort of sorcerer/rogue class, a combination I've found I really enjoy playing when I'm given the chance.
The Polycount forum is running a contest to create a low-poly piece related to a game of your choice. The requirement is that everything is as low-poly as possible, they're asking for no textures bigger than 64x64 unless it's a "hero" piece of your work (in my case, the landscape is bigger than 64, but I kept it small enough that I think it works for the contest).
So yeah. Here's my piece. The game is Worms, of course, and the combined texture on the final render is 512x512. Here's a few WIP shots, and the final at the bottom, as well as a sketchfab version you can spin and zoom.
After several style attempts, I've landed on something I like and that's easy to work with for all the rest of my environments and props and such that I'll need for this film/game. So yeah, here ya go!
So I decided to take the day and do something just for fun. Decided to do a Zelda FanArt piece in celebration of Aounuma's recent comments that he would be open to Zelda getting some spotlight as a playable character in future games.
Gave me an opportunity to practice my character designs, which I feel are leaping forward now that I've gotten a hold of Creature Box's "The Monster Volume" to use as shape reference.
So! I took another stab at those character designs and then I finalized the weapon concepts. This represents all 4 races in my game, as well as 9 of the 10 guns (I forgot one) I intend to use.
Now I move onto modelling all of this. First up will be the 4 characters, and then I'm thinking I'll model 3 of the guns, as well as 1 melee weapon that will be designed once my think-tank and I have some concepts for me to choose from.
Back in 2003, I joined a message board for Team17, the creators of the Worms series of games. Since then it's been a wild ride of camaraderie and competition and I've made a bunch of international friends from the forum. Well last week it was announced that the forums were going to be closing.
That message board is responsible for almost all of my early animation and artwork and is probably single-handedly responsible for my acceptance into CalArts and my general success as an art student so far. To honor its death, I drew one final bit of fanart. An image of some of the most famous of the forum users, in the form of our SigWorms, fighting off hordes of abominable trolls and incompetent noobs.
Usually I use this blog for finished work, but I decided to flip the script today and show some concept stuff I'm working on. Bear in mind that NOTHING here is final, but this is where I am in my current vis dev work for my second year film idea.
The characters all need some tweaking here and there and they'll eventually get a full character sheet each that'll display them a little more clearly, but this was done just to get the idea down and to begin brainstorming personalities.
The weapons are also in early stages, I'm not even sure which among these I'm going to be using, but here are some early concept sketches regardless. I doubt any of them will look like they do here once they're finalized and modeled. But hey, such is the life of concept art.
My first ever entry into an 11 second club contest. Extremely last minute entry, I only decided to do this yesterday morning. Took probably 8-10 hours to animate with this fantastic rig that has become my favorite of the free rigs I've played with thus far.
We did an assignment in story class where we picked a director and a fairy tale out of a hat and had to create a story based on the two. My group ended up with The Princess and The Pea as done by Tim Burton.
My part of the project was the do the visual development, deciding what the world would look like, and getting an overall feel for things, as well as designing the following two shots that were used directly in the boards.
I make no claim to the idea behind the peeing cherub, the ever-mature Jessica Morrison is solely responsible for that bit of classiness ;)
With huge thanks to the amazing Ben Cohn of http://bionicbenbo.tumblr.com/ for all his work in making the music for this and just generally putting up with my complete lack of knowledge of how to work with a musician.
Based on an idea I got from a sign posted around campus calling for actors to apply for what I assume must have been a play called Survival Job, but the call for actors simply said "Survival Job Auditions today at E100" or some such, and I couldn't get over how ridiculous the idea of a survival job audition would be, and the rest is history.
This is the result of all my effort and time this year at CalArts Character Animation. This was made entirely in TV Paint, and composited in a combination of Premier and Final Cut Pro. Everything was hand drawn, and I actually didn't use any tricks to save myself time or anything else, I just drew each frame by hand on a Cintiq, and corrected any perspective issues or whatever else.
This is also likely to be the last 2D animation film I'll ever do, as I'm hugely into 3D Animation and will be making the rest of my films at CalArts in that media.
So as our final animation project, our teacher had us do a simple lip sync animation to a voice recording of him saying I love you in about 5 different ways. We got to pick which version to animate to and interpret it as we will.
Thank God for Minkyu Lee's final class involving how to animate speech, otherwise I'd have been completely lost, but now I've got some idea of how it works.... And now off to 11 Second Club!
So I'm planning a video game. It'll be a multiplayer FPS made along the lines of TF2, but with a lot of variations that I won't go into here.
Right now I'm in the planning stages, deciding what everything is going to look like, and the first step of that was modeling and texturing a really simple character design to get the idea down. Now that I know what I want the game to look like, I can go in and make the other assets, characters, etc.
This game idea will also be my second year film, so I'll also be rigging and animating these characters over the summer. Expect to see 4 more characters in this style as well as various assets, as this is what I'm planning to do with my time until school starts.
Final homework assignment for my perspective class, a bird house in three point.
I'm getting some odd color issues with this one, on my laptop monitor it's cold as hell, but on my Cintiq and every other monitor I've used it's nice and warm as it was intended to be, and when I printed this it came out warm. Perplexing. Color gives me a headache some times...
So as a bit of practice, I've been working on some speed paintings in the mornings as I have time. These were all done in something between 30 minutes and an hour, so excuse the roughness.
Figure Drawing today was all about drawing each other. We each took a turn in the model chair and everyone drew us. Here's all of my work from today, with varying levels of success.
Done in 10 minutes per drawing, using charcoal pencil.
