Barbarian Base Mesh

This is the base mesh for an original character I've been working on in class right now. The body was built in Maya and the head I sculpted in zbrush and then retopologized. Next I'll bring the whole character into zbrush and do all the detail work including adding the his accessories and weapons! I've used Maya quite a bit before but this was my first real attempt at any zbrush work, and it is an amazing application. I found I was able to relax and forget about the engineering aspect of building a character and let myself just sink into the art.

This is the sculpt from zbrush. There's a lot of detail in this first pass that you can't see in the retopologized version up top so I thought I'd include this as well. 

Finished Sci Fi Gun Model

Here is the finished video presentation for the design challenge! The model is 750 quads and all the maps used on it are 512 x 512.

Sci-Fi Gun Concepts

These are concepts for some video game assets that I'll be making in class. I thought I'd include all three phases of my process for you to see. First I did super loose sketch's, then moved onto more polished line work, and then tossed in some color.

Update: I've chosen which gun I'm going to make for the challenge so I went back into it. I changed quite a few shapes and added some detail so that when I go to model I'll have a better understanding of exactly what I want and how the forms fit together.

Animation Module

After finishing the car, we moved onto some basic animation including the ball bounce and some walk cycles etc. but this piece here was the most enjoyable. Another student and I decided we'd like to focus some of our animation on video games so we did some video game attack cycles. This a heavy hammer attack and it starts and ends in the exact same pose, as video game assets should. 

Voldy Bust

This is a personal project I've been playing around with and thought I'd share the progress. I have a diffuse and normal map in the works for it as well so hopefully I'll be putting a finished and nicely rendered bust up sometime in the near future!

Cloud Hopper

This started as a simple fun doodle and then somehow morphed into a full fledged painting. After I did the sketch I thought it would be a good piece to practice some basic lighting techniques. The hardest part of the piece was getting the cloud under his foot to feel like he had just placed his foot there. I tried looking at people running through muddy water but that resulted in the clouds feeling too heavy, so I reworked it and attempted to make it feel more airy and light. I still don't think it's entirely correct but hopefully it reads well enough. Best part was the drooooool.

Studio Lighting

I spent some of my down time last week rendering out the car in a new setting. I was curious about achieving a nice studio lighting affect to showcase the car in a simple well lit image, so I picked one of my teachers brains about it and he provided a very interesting solution that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. This image was made with no actual lights and a few planes of geometry. Two large planes are placed above the car with a white surface shader applied to them and then final gathering turned on in the render settings. That's it! It took about 2 minutes to render out something that looked pretty good and then about an hour of toying with positioning of the planes and the color of the background.