Environment Modeling Final

We had a double class this week from 3 - 7:30am which was a little tough but we covered some really cool topics from tree modeling to lighting and rendering and then went over some portfolio/website advice! It has been a pretty intense few weeks leading up to the Environment Final.  I had a little trouble nailing down the final composition but I am genuinely and pleasantly surprised with the look of this hand in!  Composition has never been a strong skill for me.  I usually get a rough idea of what I think looks good and just run with it desperate to get the bulk of work to a good level.  For this however we were pushed to question the composition a lot and keep tweaking it till it really looked good.  Its a practice I hope to use for all my work from now on.
There is still plenty to do to this image with regards to adding more intrigue and detail.  I want to redo the palm trees entirely but also just break up some of the more obvious CG'ness that comes from some of the perfect symmetry and crisp lines some of the props have.  The catapults especially were pointed out as being too perfect.  A few extra details and maybe damage would make the whole image more believable.  Then its on to texturing.
So that's it for me and Gnomon for a bit, my next challenge is to finish my last two finals up to a show-reel ready quality and build a few more show-reel pieces and then wish me luck because I will be looking for my first job as a Junior Modeler!!! :D

Gnomon CharacterModeling Final

So its been an amazing 2 months I have learnt so much and I am really happy with the end result!
I spent about 7 weeks just working on the topology of the base mesh, sculpting in the muscular form and adding skin detail etc.  It felt kinda slow compared to my previous Gnomon course but the last 3 weeks we learnt a little about fabric modeling and costume design.  When I got to this stage the development just exploded and started to look real! I did wind up hiding around 90% of my character sculpting work :p but it was still a great learning outcome.  I was getting a little worried 1 week ago before I finished up the jacket and extra props since it was looking a little bare and simple but one more week of work and it all came together!
The last few classes focused on hair and blend shapes (blend shapes are a tool animators use to do facial expressions) As for hair the first image below shows the base strips the hair is projected onto (this is low poly enough to be fed into a game engine and animated) The tpose image (3rd image down) shows how the hair looks when there is a texture applied to it and how it would look in game.  I had never modeled hair this way before but it is a really cool workflow and I really look forward to working on my next project and hopefully taking it all the way into a game engine!
So here it is the final renders for my submission for Character Modeling with Kevin Hudson.  I totally recommend this for anyone who wants to really get a grasp on how characters should be done for animation or games! check out these online Gnomon Courses if you are interested.

This is my posed shot rendered in Keyshot based on the beautiful concept piece below by Changming Xu (http://www.inspirefirst.com/2013/05/31/conceptual-art-changmingxu/)  I made my character a little chunkier than the reference since when I was sculpting the base character she looked more realistic with some muscle mass :p  I also let the jacket sit a little looser rather than quite as form hugging as the reference again it just felt more akin to the character I had in my mind.

This is the unposed (T-pose) mesh that all the development was done on.  This pose is used for modeling because it makes it much easier to rig (build a skeleton to allow animation)  You can also see the rendered hair in this image which was done using ThunderClouds GMH2 plug in which I very much recommend! A great and very easy to use tool.

This image shows some very rough color being applied to the character.  None of the props have been UV'd or textured yet this is more of a visualization shot to get an idea of the overall color and materiality of the character.

This last shot shows the high poly wireframe.  As you can see its pretty dense.  This would actually be ok for an animation for film etc. but if this character was to go into a game the mesh would have to be reduced to about 1/10th of how it looks now.