Penultimate entry......

Nearly there, if all goes to plan tomorrow and tonight I should be done by Saturday afternoon or maybe earlier!! Here are a couple of shots from the final rendered animation (which is still rendering!!) which I will put into my show reel tomorrow, all I need to do then is general formatting of images for web-portal and my website (this is the last thing on the list).

Nos

The top render is of Nos a 3D charater concept and beneath is a re-render of Cassie. I decided to enrender Cassie as I found a problem with her and I had to make a minor adjustment, Nos is a test of how much i have learnt this year and to further imprive my sculpting skills and I am pleased with the progress I have made. doing these two sculpts has made me keen to start another model once I have handed in, one that will challenge me in a more traditional human form kind of way...if you know what I mean....fat superheros anyone?!?! ;)

Cassie...

The lead charter from the game concept and one that the player would control, I decided to make something more....human to counter balance the nastiness of the main model and it was good also to improve my modelling skills by doing so.

Animations...

As I draw near the end of the project I am set in tweak or no tweak, over the next few days before rendering out the showreel I will no doubt end up playing with it until I end up back at when i startyed tweaking :D Anyway here is a couple of the test renders that I have done.

Marching on....

With just over a week left to go before submission I am surprisingly calm with everything working out well at the moment with just the show reel and evaluation to do as well as a few minor touches on other parts of the BA. Today I have done a little more work on the bust of Cassie the heroine from the game concept, I have emphasised her features and I am nearly in the position to apply some skin detail (not much as she is only a young woman) and tidy up the hair.



When the sculpt is done I will take it into Maya for a final render but for now this is a screen grab from Mudbox.

Only human!!!

A slight departure from the beasts and monsters, well 3D concept busts of the lead character for the game concept. This is about half way, well the shape is there I just need to build up the forms and then add little details to the skin and hair. Doing human concepts is more difficult than creatures due to the anatomy, as artists we are left with 2 ways to go with human subjects...realistic or exaggerated.

Getting a head....

It's amazing what a drunken conversation at a wedding can do, this is a quick head concept I have done to improve my sculpting skills and to bolster my portfolio. Yes it is a monster and I will be doing a human female and male but I thought to get myself back into the swing of using Mud after being dragged away into tech for the character I would do something a little more....well sinister. This is a reworking of the old favorite the Vampire

Additional bits and bobs!!

As well as doing a render in Mental Ray I would like to get a render done in Unreal 3 if I have time, to start myself on that road I decided to import a static mesh of the body and the textures to see what the results would be and hopefully to draw attention to any areas that require more work (like I need any more lol).


The first thing I had to do was get the model into the engine (the easiest bit) and then use the controls!!! Anyway I plugged it all together and this is the result in the model window, I need to pay more attention to the specular map and tidy up the seams on the normal map. In MR these can not be seen but here they seem to stick out.

Feeling ill so nothing technical today!!

As I am feeling rough I decided to play with lighting and a simple scene to place the model in, after some playing I got this render. Yes there is still some work to do on the lighting but it's a start :)

Light at the end....

Well this pose has been loaded up a few times here but never with the majority of the texturing done, all there is left to do as far as this is concerned is to develop the specular maps for everything apart from the body and the diffuse maps. Both the specular and the diffuse will be colour maps but focusing on the areas that need the right effect.


A simple light set at the mo but I have started to also develop the environment on paper, I am tossed up between a simple minimal environment that would focus on the model or a built environment set in the woods...this will depend on how much time I have left because I am running out of that!!!!

Weight painting is about to pick up pace as i went back and made some adjustments to the skeleton but ones that I felt were necessary, this is my plan for tomorrow and I plan to take no more than 2 days to do this leaving me a week to get the animation done ready for rendering. From the very start of the term I have always planned to finish the model by mid May to give myself a buffer and also to allow me time to put the work together ready for both the physical and on-line portfolios.

Get rigged and textured!!!

I have gone slightly insane and added a rig to the backpack....why you may ask? By doing a basic rig for the pack I am able to avoid the pack looking rigged and non-organic, after all the pack is a hollowed out human torso and would have a certain amount of give due to it's organic material.

I have also done some considerable work on the textures and they are nearing completion with only the texture for the limbs in the backpack really remaining...oh and the eyes but overall the colour maps will be done by Monday meaning that the specular will be done easily by mid week. The plan is to also finish the weight painting by Friday to make way for 5 days of intensive animating and making the scene to place him into for final render for the show reel!!!